The following sections, if they exist, are offprint from Beacham's Guide to Literature for Young Adults: "About
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Page 1

THE NECROMANCERS

Other books by Robert Hugh Benson

The Light InvisibleBy
What Authority?The King’s AchievementThe History of Richard Reynall, SolitaryThe Queen’s TragedyThe Religion
of the Plain ManThe Sanctity of the ChurchThe SentimentalistsLord of the WorldA Mirror of Shalott, composed of tales told at
a symposiumPapers of a PariahThe
ConventionalistsThe Holy Blissful Martyr
Saint Thomas of CanterburyThe Dissolution
of the Religious HousesThe NecromancersNon-Catholic DenominationsNone Other
GodsA WinnowingChrist in the
Church: a volume of religious essaysThe
Dawn of AllCome Rack! Come Rope!The CowardThe Friendship of ChristAn Average ManConfessions of a ConvertOptimismParadoxes of CatholicismPoemsInitiationOddsfish!Spiritual Letters of Monsignor R. Hugh Benson
to one of his convertsLonelinessSermon
Notes

THE NECROMANCERS

Robert Hugh Benson

First published in 1909.

Wildside Press
Doylestown, Pennsylvania

I must express my gratitude to the Rev. Father Augustine
Howard, O.P., who has kindly read this book in manuscript
and favored me with his criticisms.

—­Robert Hugh Benson.

Chapter I

I

“I am very much distressed about it all,”
murmured Mrs. Baxter.

She was a small, delicate-looking old lady, very true
to type indeed, with the silvery hair of the devout
widow crowned with an exquisite lace cap, in a filmy
black dress, with a complexion of precious china,
kind shortsighted blue eyes, and white blue-veined
hands busy now upon needlework. She bore about
with her always an atmosphere of piety, humble, tender,
and sincere, but as persistent as the gentle sandalwood
aroma which breathed from her dress. Her theory
of the universe, as the girl who watched her now was
beginning to find out, was impregnable and unapproachable.
Events which conflicted with it were either not events,
or they were so exceptional as to be negligible.
If she were hard pressed she emitted a pathetic peevishness
that rendered further argument impossible.

The room in which she sat reflected perfectly her
personality. In spite of the early Victorian
date of the furniture, there was in its arrangement
and selection a taste so exquisite as to deprive it
of even a suspicion of Philistinism. Somehow
the rosewood table on which the September morning
sun fell with serene beauty did not conflict as it
ought to have done with the Tudor paneling of the room.
A tapestry screen veiled the door into the hall, and
soft curtains of velvety gold hung on either side
of the tall, modern windows leading to the garden.
For the rest, the furniture was charming and suitable—­low
chairs, a tapestry couch, a multitude of little leather-covered
books on every table, and two low carved bookshelves
on either side of the door filled with poetry and
devotion.

Page 2

The girl who sat upright with her hands on her lap
was of another type altogether—­of that
type of which it is impossible to predicate anything
except that it makes itself felt in every company.
Any respectable astrologer would have had no difficulty
in assigning her birth to the sign of the Scorpion.
In outward appearance she was not remarkable, though
extremely pleasing, and it was a pleasingness that
grew upon acquaintance. Her beauty, such as it
was, was based upon a good foundation: upon regular
features, a slightly cleft rounded chin, a quantity
of dark coiled hair, and large, steady, serene brown
eyes. Her hands were not small, but beautifully
shaped; her figure slender, well made, and always
at its ease in any attitude. In fact, she had
an air of repose, strength, and all-round competence;
and, contrasted with the other, she resembled a well-bred
sheep-dog eyeing an Angora cat.

They were talking now about Laurie Baxter.

“Dear Laurie is so impetuous and sensitive,”
murmured his mother, drawing her needle softly through
the silk, and then patting her material, “and
it is all terribly sad.”

This was undeniable, and Maggie said nothing, though
her lips opened as if for speech. Then she closed
them again, and sat watching the twinkling fire of
logs upon the hearth. Then once more Mrs. Baxter
took up the tale.

“When I first heard of the poor girl’s
death,” she said, “it seemed to me so
providential. It would have been too dreadful
if he had married her. He was away from home,
you know, on Thursday, when it happened; but he was
back here on Friday, and has been like—­like
a madman ever since. I have done what I could,
but—­”

“Was she quite impossible?” asked the
girl in her slow voice. “I never saw her,
you know.”

Mrs. Baxter laid down her embroidery.

“My dear, she was. Well, I have not a word
against her character, of course. She was all
that was good, I believe. But, you know, her home,
her father—­well, what can you expect from
a grocer—­and a Baptist,” she added,
with a touch of vindictiveness.

“What was she like?” asked the girl, still
with that meditative air.

“My dear, she was like—­like a picture
on a chocolate-box. I can say no more than that.
She was little and fair-haired, with a very pretty
complexion, and a ribbon in her hair always. Laurie
brought her up here to see me, you know—­in
the garden; I felt I could not bear to have her in
the house just yet, though, of course, it would have
had to have come. She spoke very carefully, but
there was an unmistakable accent. Once she left
out an aitch, and then she said the word over again
quite right.”

Maggie nodded gently, with a certain air of pity,
and Mrs. Baxter went on encouraged.

“She had a little stammer that—­that
Laurie thought very pretty, and she had a restless
little way of playing with her fingers as if on a
piano. Oh, my dear, it would have been too dreadful;
and now, my poor boy—­”

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The old lady’s eyes filled with compassionate
tears, and she laid her sewing down to fetch out a
little lace-fringed pocket-handkerchief.

Maggie leaned back with one easy movement in her low
chair, clasping her hands behind her head; but she
still said nothing. Mrs. Baxter finished the
little ceremony of wiping her eyes, and, still winking
a little, bending over her needlework, continued the
commentary.

“Do try to help him, my dear. That was
why I asked you to come back yesterday. I wanted
you to be in the house for the funeral. You see,
Laurie’s becoming a Catholic at Oxford has brought
you two together. It’s no good my talking
to him about the religious side of it all; he thinks
I know nothing at all about the next world, though
I’m sure—­”

“Tell me,” said the girl suddenly, still
in the same attitude, “has he been practicing
his religion? You see, I haven’t seen much
of him this year, and—­”

“I’m afraid not very well,” said
the old lady tolerantly. “He thought he
was going to be a priest at first, you remember, and
I’m sure I should have made no objection; and
then in the spring he seemed to be getting rather
tired of it all. I don’t think he gets on
with Father Mahon very well. I don’t think
Father Mahon understands him quite. It was he,
you know, who told him not to be a priest, and I think
that discouraged poor Laurie.”

“I see,” said the girl shortly. And
Mrs. Baxter applied herself again to her sewing.

* * * *
*

It was indeed a rather trying time for the old lady.
She was a tranquil and serene soul; and it seemed
as if she were doomed to live over a perpetual volcano.
It was as pathetic as an amiable cat trying to go
to sleep on a rifle range; she was developing the jumps.
The first serious explosion had taken place two years
before, when her son, then in his third year at Oxford,
had come back with the announcement that Rome was
the only home worthy to shelter his aspiring soul,
and that he must be received into the Church in six
weeks’ time. She had produced little books
for his edification, as in duty bound, she had summoned
Anglican divines to the rescue; but all had been useless,
and Laurie had gone back to Oxford as an avowed proselyte.

She had soon become accustomed to the idea, and indeed,
when the first shock was over had not greatly disliked
it, since her own adopted daughter, of half French
parentage, Margaret Marie Deronnais, had been educated
in the same faith, and was an eminently satisfactory
person. The next shock was Laurie’s announcement
of his intention to enter the priesthood, and perhaps
the Religious Life as well; but this too had been
tempered by the reflection that in that case Maggie
would inherit this house and carry on its traditions
in a suitable manner. Maggie had come to her,
upon leaving her convent school three years before,
with a pleasant little income of her own—­had

Page 4

come to her by an arrangement made previously to her
mother’s death—­and her manner of
life, her reasonableness, her adaptability, her presentableness
had reassured the old lady considerably as to the
tolerableness of the Roman Catholic religion.
Indeed, once she had hoped that Laurie and Maggie
might come to an understanding that would prevent all
possible difficulty as to the future of his house
and estate; but the fourth volcanic storm had once
more sent the world flying in pieces about Mrs. Baxter’s
delicate ears; and, during the last three months she
had had to face the prospect of Laurie’s bringing
home as a bride the rather underbred, pretty, stammering,
pink and white daughter of a Baptist grocer of the
village.

This had been a terrible affair altogether; Laurie,
as is the custom of a certain kind of young male,
had met, spoken to, and ultimately kissed this Amy
Nugent, on a certain summer evening as the stars came
out; but, with a chivalry not so common in such cases,
had also sincerely and simply fallen in love with
her, with a romance usually reserved for better-matched
affections. It seemed, from Laurie’s conversation,
that Amy was possessed of every grace of body, mind,
and soul required in one who was to be mistress of
the great house; it was not, so Laurie explained,
at all a milkmaid kind of affair; he was not the man,
he said, to make a fool of himself over a pretty face.
No, Amy was a rare soul, a flower growing on stony
soil—­sandy perhaps would be the better
word—­and it was his deliberate intention
to make her his wife.

Then had followed every argument known to mothers,
for it was not likely that even Mrs. Baxter would
accept without a struggle a daughter-in-law who, five
years before, had bobbed to her, wearing a pinafore,
and carrying in a pair of rather large hands a basket
of eggs to her back door. Then she had consented
to see the girl, and the interview in the garden had
left her more distressed than ever. (It was there
that the aitch incident had taken place.) And so the
struggle had gone on; Laurie had protested, stormed,
sulked, taken refuge in rhetoric and dignity alternately;
and his mother had with gentle persistence objected,
held her peace, argued, and resisted, conflicting
step by step against the inevitable, seeking to reconcile
her son by pathos and her God by petition; and then
in an instant, only four days ago, it seemed that
the latter had prevailed; and today Laurie, in a black
suit, rent by sorrow, at this very hour at which the
two ladies sat and talked in the drawing-room, was
standing by an open grave in the village churchyard,
seeing the last of his love, under a pile of blossoms
as pink and white as her own complexion, within four
elm-boards with a brass plate upon the cover.

Now, therefore, there was a new situation to face,
and Mrs. Baxter was regarding it with apprehension.

* * * *
*

It is true that mothers know sometimes more of their
sons than their sons know of themselves, but there
are certain elements of character that sometimes neither
mothers nor sons appreciate. It was one or two
of those elements that Maggie Deronnais, with her hands
behind her head, was now considering. It seemed
to her very odd that neither the boy himself nor Mrs.
Baxter in the least seemed to realize the astonishing
selfishness of this very boy’s actions.

Page 5

She had known him now for three years, though owing
to her own absence in France a part of the time, and
his absence in London for the rest, she had seen nothing
of this last affair. At first she had liked him
exceedingly; he had seemed to her ardent, natural,
and generous. She had liked his affection for
his mother and his demonstrativeness in showing it;
she had liked his well-bred swagger, his manner with
servants, his impulsive courtesy to herself. It
was a real pleasure to her to see him, morning by
morning, in his knickerbockers and Norfolk jacket,
or his tweed suit; and evening by evening in his swallow-tail
coat and white shirt, and the knee breeches and buckled
shoes that he wore by reason of the touch of picturesque
and defiant romanticism that was so obvious a part
of his nature. Then she had begun, little by
little, to perceive the egotism that was even more
apparent; his self-will, his moodiness, and his persistence.

Though, naturally, she had approved of his conversion
to Catholicism, yet she was not sure that his motives
were pure. She had hoped indeed that the Church,
with its astonishing peremptoriness, might do something
towards a moral conversion, as well as an artistic
and intellectual change of view. But this, it
seemed, had not happened; and this final mad episode
of Amy Nugent had fanned her criticism to indignation.
She did not disapprove of romance—­in fact
she largely lived by it—­but there were
things even more important, and she was as angry as
she could be, with decency, at this last manifestation
of selfishness.

For the worst of it was that, as she knew perfectly
well, Laurie was rather an exceptional person.
He was not at all the Young Fool of Fiction.
There was a remarkable virility about him, he was
tender-hearted to a degree, he had more than his share
of brains. It was intolerable that such a person
should be so silly.

She wondered what sorrow would do for him. She
had come down from Scotland the night before, and
down here to Herefordshire this morning; she had not
then yet seen him; and he was now at the funeral....

Well, sorrow would be his test. How would he
take it?

Mrs. Baxter broke in on her meditations.

“Maggy, darling ... do you think you can do
anything? You know I once hoped....”

The girl looked up suddenly, with so vivid an air
that it was an interruption. The old lady broke
off.

The old lady sighed; then she said suddenly, looking
at the clock above the oak mantelshelf, “It
is half-past. I expect—­”

She broke off as the front door was heard to open
and close beyond the hall, and waited, paling a little,
as steps sounded on the flags; but the steps went
up the stairs outside, and there was silence again.

Page 6

“He has come back,” she said. “Oh!
my dear.”

“How shall you treat him?” asked the girl
curiously.

The old lady bent again over her embroidery.

“I think I shall just say nothing. I hope
he will ride this afternoon. Will you go with
him?”

“I think not. He won’t want anyone.
I know Laurie.”

The other looked up at her sideways in a questioning
way, and Maggie went on with a kind of slow decisiveness.

“He will be queer at lunch. Then he will
probably ride alone and be late for tea. Then
tomorrow—­”

“She’s—­she’s the wife
of Colonel Stapleton. She goes in for what I
think is called New Thought; at least, so somebody
told me last month. I’m afraid she’s
not a very steady person. She was a vegetarian
last year; now I believe she’s given that up
again.”

Maggie smiled slowly, showing a row of very white,
strong teeth.

“I know, auntie,” she said. “No;
I shouldn’t think Laurie’ll mind much.
Perhaps he’ll go back to town in the morning,
too.”

“No, my dear, he’s staying till Thursday.”

* * * *
*

There fell again one of those pleasant silences that
are possible in the country. Outside the garden,
with the meadows beyond the village road, lay in that
sweet September hush of sunlight and mellow color
that seemed to embalm the house in peace. From
the farm beyond the stable-yard came the crowing of
a cock, followed by the liquid chuckle of a pigeon
perched somewhere overhead among the twisted chimneys.
And within this room all was equally at peace.
The sunshine lay on table and polished floor, barred
by the mullions of the windows, and stained here and
there by the little Flemish emblems and coats that
hung across the glass; while those two figures, so
perfectly in place in their serenity and leisure,
sat before the open fire-place and contemplated the
very unpeaceful element that had just walked upstairs
incarnate in a pale, drawn-eyed young man in black.

The house, in fact, was one of those that have a personality
as marked and as mysterious as of a human character.
It affected people in quite an extraordinary way.
It took charge of the casual guest, entertained and
soothed and sometimes silenced him; and it cast upon
all who lived in it an enchantment at once inexplicable
and delightful. Externally it was nothing remarkable.

Page 7

It was a large, square-built house, close indeed to
the road, but separated from it by a high wrought-iron
gate in an oak paling, and a short, straight garden-path;
originally even ante-Tudor, but matured through centuries,
with a Queen Anne front of mellow red brick, and back
premises of tile, oak, and modern rough-cast, with
old brew-houses that almost enclosed a graveled court
behind. Behind this again lay a great kitchen
garden with box-lined paths dividing it all into a
dozen rectangles, separated from the orchard and yew
walk by a broad double hedge down the center of which
ran a sheltered path. Round the south of the
house and in the narrow strip westwards lay broad
lawns surrounded by high trees completely shading it
from all view of the houses that formed the tiny hamlet
fifty yards away.

Within, the house had been modernized almost to a
commonplace level. A little hall gave entrance
to the drawing-room on the right where these two women
now sat, a large, stately room, paneled from floor
to ceiling, and to the dining-room on the left; and,
again, through to the back, where a smoking room,
an inner hall, and the big kitchens and back premises
concluded the ground floor. The two more stories
above consisted, on the first floor, of a row of large
rooms, airy, high, and dignified, and in the attics
of a series of low-pitched chambers, whitewashed,
oak-floored, and dormer-windowed, where one or two
of the servants slept in splendid isolation. A
little flight of irregular steps leading out of the
big room on to the first floor, where the housekeeper
lived in state, gave access to the further rooms near
the kitchen and sculleries.

Maggie had fallen in love with the place from the
instant that she had entered it. She had been
warned in her French convent of the giddy gaieties
of the world and its temptations; and yet it seemed
to her after a week in her new home that the world
was very much maligned. There was here a sense
of peace and sheltered security that she had hardly
known even at school; and little by little she had
settled down here, with the mother and the son, until
it had begun to seem to her that days spent in London
or in other friends’ houses were no better than
interruptions and failures compared with the leisurely,
tender life of this place, where it was so easy to
read and pray and possess her soul in peace.
This affair of Laurie’s was almost the first
reminder of what she had known by hearsay, that Love
and Death and Pain were the bones on which life was
modeled.

With a sudden movement she leaned forward, took up
the bellows, and began to blow the smoldering logs
into flame.

* * * *
*

Meanwhile, upstairs on a long couch beside the fire
in his big bed-sitting-room lay a young man on his
face motionless.

A week ago he had been one of those men who in almost
any company appear easy and satisfactory, and, above
all, are satisfactory to themselves. His life
was a very pleasant one indeed.

Page 8

He had come down from Oxford just a year ago, and
had determined to take things as they came, to foster
acquaintanceships, to travel a little with a congenial
friend, to stay about in other people’s houses,
and, in fact, to enjoy himself entirely before settling
down to read law. He had done this most successfully,
and had crowned all, as has been related, by falling
in love on a July evening with one who, he was quite
certain, was the mate designed for him for Time and
Eternity. His life, in fact, up to three days
ago had developed along exactly those lines along
which his temperament traveled with the greatest ease.
He was the only son of a widow, he had an excellent
income, he made friends wherever he went, and he had
just secured the most charming rooms close to the
Temple. He had plenty of brains, an exceedingly
warm heart, and had lately embraced a religion that
satisfied every instinct of his nature. It was
the best of all possible worlds, and fitted him like
his own well-cut clothes. It consisted of privileges
without responsibilities.

And now the crash had come, and all was over.

As the gong sounded for luncheon he turned over and
lay on his back, staring at the ceiling.

It should have been a very attractive face under other
circumstances. Beneath his brown curls, just
touched with gold, there looked out a pair of grey
eyes, bright a week ago, now dimmed with tears, and
patched beneath with lines of sorrow. His clean-cut,
rather passionate lips were set now, with down-turned
corners, in a line of angry self-control piteous to
see; and his clear skin seemed stained and dull.
He had never dreamt of such misery in all his days.

As he lay now, with lax hands at his side, tightening
at times in an agony of remembrance, he was seeing
vision after vision, turning now and again to the
contemplation of a dark future without life or love
or hope. Again he saw Amy, as he had first seen
her under the luminous July evening, jeweled overhead
with peeping stars, amber to the westwards, where
the sun had gone down in glory. She was in her
sun-bonnet and print dress, stepping towards him across
the fresh-scented meadow grass lately shorn of its
flowers and growth, looking at him with that curious
awed admiration that delighted him with its flattery.
Her face was to the west, the reflected glory lay
on it as delicate as the light on a flower, and her
blue eyes regarded him beneath a halo of golden hair.

He saw her again as she had been one moonlight evening
as the two stood together by the sluice of the stream,
among the stillness of the woods below the village,
with all fairyland about them and in their hearts.
She had thrown a wrap about her head and stolen down
there by devious ways, according to the appointment,
meeting him, as was arranged, as he came out from
dinner with all the glamour of the Great House about
him, in his evening dress, buckled shoes, and knee-breeches
all complete. How marvelous she had been then—­a

Page 9

sweet nymph of flesh and blood, glorified by the moon
to an ethereal delicacy, with the living pallor of
sun-kissed skin, her eyes looking at him like stars
beneath her shawl. They had said very little;
they had stood there at the sluice gate, with his
arm about her, and herself willingly nestling against
him, trembling now and again; looking out at the sheeny
surface of the slow flowing stream from which, in
the imperceptible night breeze, stole away wraith after
wraith of water mist to float and lose themselves in
the sleeping woods.

Or, once more, clearer than all else he remembered
how he had watched her, himself unseen, delaying the
delight of revealing himself, one August morning,
scarcely three weeks ago, as she had come down the
road that ran past the house, again in her sun-bonnet
and print dress, with the dew shining about her on
grass and hedge, and the haze of a summer morning
veiling the intensity of the blue sky above. He
had called her then gently by name, and she had turned
her face to him, alight with love and fear and sudden
wonder.... He remembered even now with a reflection
of memory that was nearly an illusion the smell of
yew and garden flowers.

This, then, had been the dream; and today the awakening
and the end.

That end was even more terrible than he had conceived
possible on that horrible Friday morning last week,
when he had opened the telegram from her father.

He had never before understood the sordidness of her
surroundings, as when, an hour ago, he had stood at
the grave-side, his eyes wandering from that long
elm box with the silver plate and the wreath of flowers,
to the mourners on the other side—­her father
in his broadcloth, his heavy, smooth face pulled in
lines of grotesque sorrow; her mother, with her crimson,
tear-stained cheeks, her elaborate black, her intolerable
crape, and her jet-hung mantle. Even these people
had been seen by him up to then through a haze of love;
he had thought them simple honest folk, creatures of
the soil, yet wholesome, natural, and sturdy.
And now that the jewel was lost the setting was worse
than empty. There in the elm box lay the remnants
of the shattered gem.... He had seen her in her
bed on the Sunday, her fallen face, her sunken eyes,
all framed in the detestable whiteness of linen and
waxen flowers, yet as pathetic and as appealing as
ever, and as necessary to his life. It was then
that the supreme fact had first penetrated to his
consciousness, that he had lost her—­the
fact which, driven home by the funeral scene this
morning, the rustling crowd come to see the young
Squire, the elm box, the heap of flowers—­had
now flung him down on this couch, crushed, broken,
and hopeless, like young ivy after a thunderstorm.

His moods alternated with the rapidity of flying clouds.
At one instant he was furious with pain, at the next
broken and lax from the same cause. At one moment
he cursed God and desired to die, defiant and raging;
at the next he sank down into himself as weak as a
tortured child, while tears ran down his cheeks and
little moans as of an animal murmured in his throat.
God was a hated adversary, a merciless Judge ... a
Blind Fate ... there was no God ... He was a
Fiend.... there was nothing anywhere in the whole universe
but Pain and Vanity....

Page 10

Yet, through it all, like a throbbing pedal note,
ran his need of this girl. He would do anything,
suffer anything, make any sacrifice, momentary or
lifelong, if he could but see her again, hold her hand
for one instant, look into her eyes mysterious with
the secret of death. He had but three or four
words to say to her, just to secure himself that she
lived and was still his, and then ... then he would
say good-bye to her, content and happy to wait till
death should reunite them. Ah! he asked so little,
and God would not give it him.

All, then, was a mockery. It was only this past
summer that he had begun to fancy himself in love
with Maggie Deronnais. It had been an emotion
of very quiet growth, developing gently, week by week,
feeding on her wholesomeness, her serenity, her quiet
power, her cool, capable hands, and the look in her
direct eyes; it resembled respect rather than passion,
and need rather than desire; it was a hunger rather
than a thirst. Then had risen up this other,
blinding and bewildering; and, he told himself, he
now knew the difference. His lips curled into
bitter and resentful lines as he contemplated the contrast.
And all was gone, shattered and vanished; and even
Maggie was now impossible.

Again he writhed over, sick with pain and longing;
and so lay.

* * * *
*

It was ten minutes before he moved again, and then
he only roused himself as he heard a foot on the stairs.
Perhaps it was his mother. He slipped off the
couch and stood up, his face lined and creased with
the pressure with which he had lain just now, and smoothed
his tumbled clothes. Yes, he must go down.

He stepped to the door and opened it.

“I am coming immediately,” he said to
the servant.

* * * *
*

He bore himself at lunch with a respectable self-control,
though he said little or nothing. His mother’s
attitude he found hard to bear, as he caught her eyes
once or twice looking at him with sympathy; and he
allowed himself internally to turn to Maggie with relief
in spite of his meditations just now. She at
least respected his sorrow, he told himself.
She bore herself very naturally, though with long
silences, and never once met his eyes with her own.
He made his excuses as soon as he could and slipped
across to the stable yard. At least he would
be alone this afternoon. Only, as he rode away
half an hour later, he caught a sight of the slender
little figure of his mother waiting to have one word
with him if she could, beyond the hall-door.
But he set his lips and would not see her.

Page 11

It was one of those perfect September days that fall
sometimes as a gift from heaven after the bargain
of summer has been more or less concluded. As
he rode all that afternoon through lanes and across
uplands, his view barred always to the north by the
great downs above Royston, grey-blue against the radiant
sky, there was scarcely a hint in earth or heaven
of any emotion except prevailing peace. Yet the
very serenity tortured him the more by its mockery.
The birds babbled in the deep woods, the cheerful
noise of children reached him now and again from a
cottage garden, the mellow light smiled unending benediction,
and yet his subconsciousness let go for never an instant
of the long elm box six feet below ground, and of its
contents lying there in the stifling dark, in the
long-grassed churchyard on the hill above his home.

He wondered now and again as to the fate of the spirit
that had informed the body and made it what it was;
but his imagination refused to work. After all,
he asked himself, what were all the teachings of theology
but words gabbled to break the appalling silence?
Heaven ... Purgatory ... Hell. What
was known of these things? The very soul itself—­what
was that? What was the inconceivable environment,
after all, for so inconceivable a thing...?

He did not need these things, he said—­certainly
not now—­nor those labels and signposts
to a doubtful, unimaginable land. He needed Amy
herself, or, at least, some hint or sound or glimpse
to show him that she indeed was as she had always
been; whether in earth or heaven, he did not care;
that there was somewhere something that was herself,
some definite personal being of a continuous consciousness
with that which he had known, characterized still
by those graces which he thought he had recognized
and certainly loved. Ah! he did not ask much.
It would be so easy to God! Here out in this lonely
lane where he rode beneath the branches, his reins
loose on his horse’s neck, his eyes, unseeing,
roving over copse and meadow across to the eternal
hills—­a face, seen for an instant, smiling
and gone again; a whisper in his ear, with that dear
stammer of shyness; a touch on his knee of those rippling
fingers that he had watched in the moonlight playing
gently on the sluice-gate above the moonlit stream....
He would tell no one if God wished it to be a secret;
he would keep it wholly to himself. He did not
ask now to possess her; only to be certain that she
lived, and that death was not what it seemed to be.

* * * *
*

“Is Father Mahon at home?” he asked, as
he halted a mile from his own house in the village,
where stood the little tin church, not a hundred yards
from its elder alienated sister, to which he and Maggie
went on Sundays.

The housekeeper turned from her vegetable-gathering
beyond the fence, and told him yes. He dismounted,
hitched the reins round the gatepost, and went in.

Ah! what an antipathetic little room this was in which
he waited while the priest was being fetched from
upstairs!

Page 12

Over the mantelpiece hung a large oleograph of Leo
XIII, in cope and tiara, blessing with upraised hand
and that eternal, wide-lipped smile; a couple of jars
stood beneath filled with dyed grasses; a briar pipe,
redolent and foul, lay between them. The rest
of the room was in the same key: a bright Brussels
carpet, pale and worn by the door, covered the floor;
cheap lace curtains were pinned across the windows;
and over the littered table a painted deal bookshelf
held a dozen volumes, devotional, moral, and dogmatic
theology; and by the side of that an illuminated address
framed in gilt, and so on.

Laurie looked at it all in dumb dismay. He had
seen it before, again and again, but had never realized
its horror as he realized it now from the depths of
his own misery. Was it really true that his religion
could emit such results?

There was a step on the stairs—­a very heavy
one—­and Father Mahon came in, a large,
crimson-faced man, who seemed to fill the room with
a completely unethereal presence, and held out his
hand with a certain gravity. Laurie took it and
dropped it.

“Sit down, my dear boy,” said the priest,
and he impelled him gently to a horsehair-covered
arm-chair.

Laurie stiffened.

“Thank you, father; but I mustn’t stay.”

He fumbled in his pocket, and fetched out a little
paper-covered packet.

“Will you say Mass for my intention, please?”
And he laid the packet on the mantelshelf.

The priest took up the coins and slipped them into
his waistcoat pocket.

“Certainly,” he said. “I think
I know—­”

Laurie turned away with a little jerk.

“I must be going,” he said. “I
only looked in—­”

“Mr. Baxter,” said the other, “I
hope you will allow me to say how much—­”

Laurie drew his breath swiftly, with a hiss as of
pain, and glanced at the priest.

“You understand, then, what my intention is?”

“Why, surely. It is for her soul, is it
not?”

“I suppose so,” said the boy, and went
out.

Chapter II

I

“I have told him,” said Mrs. Baxter, as
the two women walked beneath the yews that morning
after breakfast. “He said he didn’t
mind.”

Maggie did not speak. She had come out just as
she was, hatless, but had caught up a spud that stood
in the hall, and at that instant had stopped to destroy
a youthful plantain that had established himself with
infinite pains on the slope of the path. She attacked
for a few seconds, extricated what was possible of
the root with her strong fingers, tossed the corpse
among the ivy, and then moved on.

“I don’t know whether to say anything
to Mrs. Stapleton or not,” pursued the old lady.

“I think I shouldn’t, auntie,” said
the girl slowly.

They spoke of it for a minute or two as they passed
up and down, but Maggie only attended with one superficies
of her mind.

Page 13

She had gone up as usual to Mass that morning, and
had been astonished to find Laurie already in church;
they had walked back together, and, to her surprise,
he had told her that the Mass had been for his own
intention.

She had answered as well as she could; but a sentence
or two of his as they came near home had vaguely troubled
her.

It was not that he had said anything he ought not,
as a Catholic, to have said; yet her instinct told
her that something was wrong. It was his manner,
his air, that troubled her. What strange people
these converts were! There was so much ardor
at one time, so much chilliness at another; there
was so little of that steady workaday acceptance of
religious facts that marked the born Catholic.

“Mrs. Stapleton is a New Thought kind of person,”
she said presently.

“So I understand,” said the old lady,
with a touch of peevishness. “A vegetarian
last year. And I believe she was a sort of Buddhist
five or six years ago. And then she nearly became
a Christian Scientist a little while ago.”

Maggie smiled.

“I wonder what she’ll talk about,”
she said.

“I hope she won’t be very advanced,”
went on the old lady. “And you think I’d
better not tell her about Laurie?”

“I’m sure it’s best not,”
said the girl, “or she’ll tell him about
Deep Breathing, or saying Om, or something. No;
I should let Laurie alone.”

* * * *
*

It was a little before one o’clock that the
motor arrived, and that there descended from it at
the iron gate a tall, slender woman, hooded and veiled,
who walked up the little path, observed by Maggie from
her bedroom, with a kind of whisking step. The
motor moved on, wheeled in through the gates at the
left, and sank into silence in the stable-yard.

“It’s too charming of you, dear Mrs. Baxter,”
Maggie heard as she came into the drawing-room a minute
or two later, “to let me come over like this.
I’ve heard so much about this house. Lady
Laura was telling me how very psychical it all was.”

“My adopted daughter, Miss Deronnais,”
observed the old lady.

Maggie saw a rather pretty, passe face, triangular
in shape, with small red lips, looking at her, as
she made her greetings.

“Ah! how perfect all this is,” went on
the guest presently, looking about her, “how
suggestive, how full of meaning!”

She threw back her cloak presently, and Maggie observed
that she was busy with various very beautiful little
emblems—­a scarab, a snake swallowing its
tail, and so forth—­all exquisitely made,
and hung upon a slender chain of some green enamel-like
material. Certainly she was true to type.
As the full light fell upon her it became plain that
this other-worldly soul did not disdain to use certain
toilet requisites upon her face; and a curious Eastern
odor exhaled from her dress.

Page 14

Fortunately, Maggie had a very deep sense of humor,
and she hardly resented all this at all, nor even
the tactful hints dropped from time to time, after
the conventional part of the conversation was over,
to the effect that Christianity was, of course, played
out, and that a Higher Light had dawned. Mrs.
Stapleton did not quite say this outright, but it
amounted to as much. Even before Laurie came
downstairs it appeared that the lady did not go to
church, yet that, such was her broad-mindedness, she
did not at all object to do so. It was all one,
it seemed, in the Deeper Unity. Nothing particular
was true; but all was very suggestive and significant
and symbolical of something else to which Mrs. Stapleton
and a few friends had the key.

Mrs. Baxter made more than one attempt to get back
to more mundane subjects, but it was useless.
When even the weather serves as a symbol, the plain
man is done for.

Then Laurie came in.

He looked very self-contained and rather pinched this
morning, and shook hands with the lady without a word.
Then they moved across presently to the green-hung
dining-room across the hall, and the exquisite symbol
of Luncheon made its appearance.

Lady Laura, it appeared, was one of those who had
felt the charm of Stantons; only for her it was psychical
rather than physical, and all this was passed on by
her friend. It seemed that the psychical atmosphere
of most modern houses was of a yellow tint, but that
this one emanated a brown-gold radiance which was
very peculiar and exceptional. Indeed, it was
this singularity that had caused Mrs. Stapleton to
apply for an invitation to the house. More than
once during lunch, in a pause of the conversation,
Maggie saw her throw back her head slightly as if
to appreciate some odor or color not experienced by
coarser-nerved persons. Once, indeed, she actually
put this into words.

“Dear Laura was quite right,” cried the
lady; “there is something very unique about
this place. How fortunate you are, dear Mrs. Baxter!”

“My dear husband’s grandfather bought
the place,” observed the mistress plaintively.
“We have always found it very soothing and pleasant.”

“How right you are! And—­and
have you had any experiences here?” Mrs. Baxter
eyed her in alarm. Maggie had an irrepressible
burst of internal laughter, which, however, gave no
hint of its presence in her steady features.
She glanced at Laurie, who was eating mutton with a
depressed air.

“I was talking to Mr. Vincent, the great spiritualist,”
went on the other vivaciously, “only last week.
You have heard of him, Mrs. Baxter? I was suggesting
to him that any place where great emotions have been
felt is colored and stained by them as objectively
as old walls are weather-beaten. I had such an
interesting conversation, too, with Cardinal Newman
on the subject”—­she smiled brilliantly
at Maggie, as if to reassure her of her own orthodoxy—­“scarcely
six weeks ago.”

Page 15

There was a pregnant silence. Mrs. Baxter’s
fork sank to her plate.

“I don’t understand,” she said faintly.
“Cardinal Newman—­surely—­”

“Why yes,” said the other gently.
“I know it sounds very startling to orthodox
ears; but to us of the Higher Thought all these things
are quite familiar. Of course, I need hardly
say that Cardinal Newman is no longer—­but
perhaps I had better not go on.”

The other looked at her doubtfully; but there was
no hint of irony in the girl’s face.

“Well,” she began, “of course on
the Other Side they see things very differently.
I don’t mean at all that any religion is exactly
untrue. Oh no; they tell us that if we cannot
welcome the New Light, then the old lights will do
very well for the present. Indeed, when there
are Catholics present Cardinal Newman does not scruple
to give them a Latin blessing—­”

“Is it true that he speaks with an American
accent?” asked Maggie gravely. The other
laughed with a somewhat shrill geniality.

“That is too bad, Miss Deronnais. Well,
of course, the personality of the medium affects the
vehicle through which the communications come.
That is no difficulty at all when once you understand
the principle—­”

Mrs. Baxter interrupted. She could bear it no
longer.

“Mrs. Stapleton. Do you mean that Cardinal
Newman really speaks to you?”

“Why yes,” said the other, with a patient
indulgence. “That is a very usual experience,
but Mr. Vincent does much more than that. It is
quite a common experience not only to hear him, but
to see him. I have shaken hands with him more
than once ... and I have seen a Catholic kiss his
ring.”

Mrs. Baxter looked helplessly at the girl; and Maggie
came to the rescue once more. “This sounds
rather advanced to us,” she said. “Won’t
you explain the principles first?”

Mrs. Stapleton laid her knife and fork down, leaned
back, and began to discourse. When a little later
her plate was removed, she refused sweets with a gesture,
and continued.

Altogether she spoke for about ten minutes, uninterrupted,
enjoying herself enormously. The others ate food
or refused it in attentive silence. Then at last
she ended.

“... I know all this must sound quite mad
and fanatical to those who have not experienced it;
and yet to us who have been disciples it is as natural
to meet our friends who have crossed over as to meet
those who have not.... Dear Mrs. Baxter, think
how all this enlarges life. There is no longer
any death to those who understand. All those
limitations are removed; it is no more than going into
another room. All are together in the Hands of
the All-Father”—­Maggie recognized
the jetsam of Christian Science. “‘O death!’
as Paul says, ‘where is thy sting? O grave,
where is thy victory?’”

Page 16

Mrs. Stapleton flashed a radiant look of helpfulness
round the faces, lingering for an instant on Laurie’s,
and leaned back.

There followed a silence.

“Shall we go into the drawing-room?” suggested
Mrs. Baxter, feebly rising. The guest rose too,
again with a brilliant patient smile, and swept out.
Maggie crossed herself and looked at Laurie. The
boy had an expression, half of disgust, half of interest,
and his eyelids sank a little and rose again.
Then Maggie went out after the others.

II

“A dreadful woman,” observed Mrs. Baxter
half an hour later, as the two strolled back up the
garden path, after seeing Mrs. Stapleton wave a delicately
gloved hand encouragingly to them over the back of
the throbbing motor.

“I suppose she thinks she believes it all,”
said Maggie.

“My dear, that woman would believe anything.
I hope poor Laurie was not too much distressed.”

“Oh! I think Laurie took it all right.”

“It was most unfortunate, all that about death
and the rest.... Why, here comes Laurie; I thought
he would be gone out by now!”

The boy strolled towards them round the corner of
the house, tossing away the fragment of his cigarette.
He was still in his dark suit, bareheaded, with no
signs of riding about him.

“So you’ve not gone out yet, dear boy?”
remarked his mother.

“Not yet,” he said, and hesitated as they
went on.

Mrs. Baxter noticed it.

“I’ll go and get ready,” she said.
“The carriage will be round at three, Maggie.”

When she was gone the two moved out together on to
the lawn.

“What did you think of that woman?” demanded
Laurie with a detached air.

Maggie glanced at him. His tone was a little
too much detached.

“I thought her quite dreadful,” she said
frankly. “Didn’t you?” she
added.

“Oh yes, I suppose so,” said Laurie.
He drew out a cigarette and lighted it. “You
know a lot of people think there’s something
in it,” he said.

“In what?”

“Spiritualism.”

“I daresay,” said Maggie.

She perceived out of the corner of her eye that Laurie
looked at her suddenly and sharply. For herself,
she loathed what little she knew of the subject, so
cordially and completely, that she could hardly have
put it into words. Nine-tenths of it she believed
to be fraud—­a matter of wigs and Indian
muslin and cross-lights—­and the other tenth,
by the most generous estimate, an affair of the dingiest
and foulest of all the backstairs of life. The
prophetic outpourings of Mrs. Stapleton had not altered
her opinion.

“Oh! if you feel like that—­”
went on Laurie.

She turned on him.

“Laurie,” she said, “I think it
perfectly detestable. I acknowledge I don’t
know much about it; but what little I do know is enough,
thank you.”

Page 17

Laurie smiled in a faintly patronizing way.

“Well,” he said indulgently, “if
you think that, it’s not much use discussing
it.”

“Indeed it’s not,” said Maggie,
with her nose in the air.

There was not much more to be said; and the sounds
of stamping and whoaing in the stable-yard presently
sent the girl indoors in a hurry.

Mrs. Baxter was still mildly querulous during the
drive. It appeared to her, Maggie perceived,
a kind of veiled insult that things should be talked
about in her house which did not seem to fit in with
her own scheme of the universe. Mrs. Baxter knew
perfectly well that every soul when it left this world
went either to what she called Paradise, or in extremely
exceptional cases, to a place she did not name; and
that these places, each in its own way, entirely absorbed
the attention of its inhabitants. Further, it
was established in her view that all the members of
the spiritual world, apart from the unhappy ones,
were a kind of Anglicans, with their minds no doubt
enlarged considerably, but on the original lines.

Tales like this of Cardinal Newman therefore were
extremely tiresome and upsetting.

And Maggie had her theology also; to her also it appeared
quite impossible that Cardinal Newman should frequent
the drawing-room of Mr. Vincent in order to exchange
impressions with Mrs. Stapleton; but she was more
elementary in her answer. For her the thing was
simply untrue; and that was the end of it. She
found it difficult therefore to follow her companion’s
train of thought.

“What was it she said?” demanded Mrs.
Baxter presently. “I didn’t understand
her ideas about materialism.”

“I think she called it materialization,”
explained Maggie patiently. “She said that
when things were very favorable, and the medium a very
good one, the soul that wanted to communicate could
make a kind of body for itself out of what she called
the astral matter of the medium or the sitters.”

“But surely our bodies aren’t like that?”

“No; I can’t say that I think they are.
But that’s what she said.”

“My dear, please explain. I want to understand
the woman.”

Maggie frowned a little.

“Well, the first thing she said was that those
souls want to communicate; and that they begin generally
by things like table-rapping, or making blue lights.
Then when you know they’re there, they can go
further. Sometimes they gain control of the medium
who is in a trance, and speak through him, or write
with his hand. Then, if things are favorable,
they begin to draw out this matter, and make it into
a kind of body for themselves, very thin and ethereal,
so that you can pass your hand through it. Then,
as things get better and better, they go further still,
and can make this body so solid that you can touch
it; only this is sometimes rather dangerous, as it
is still, in a sort of way, connected with the medium.
I think that’s the idea.”

Page 18

“But what’s the good of it all?”

“Well, you see, Mrs. Stapleton thinks that they
really are souls from the other world, and that they
can tell us all kinds of things about it all, and
what’s true, and so on.”

“But you don’t believe that?”

Maggie turned her large eyes on the old lady; and
a spark of humor rose and glimmered in them.

“Of course I don’t,” she said.

“Then how do you explain it?”

“I think it’s probably all a fraud.
But I really don’t know. It doesn’t
seem to me to matter much—­”

“But if it should be true?”

Maggie raised her eyebrows, smiling.

“Dear auntie, do put it out of your head.
How can it possibly be true?”

Mrs. Baxter set her lips in as much severity as she
could.

“I shall ask the Vicar,” she said.
“We might stop at the Vicarage on the way back.”

Mrs. Baxter did not often stop at the Vicarage; as
she did not altogether approve of the Vicar’s
wife. There was a good deal of pride in the old
lady, and it seemed to her occasionally as if Mrs.
Rymer did not understand the difference between the
Hall and the Parsonage. She envied sometimes,
secretly, the Romanist idea of celibacy: it was
so much easier to get on with your spiritual adviser
if you did not have to consider his wife. But
here, was a matter which a clergyman must settle for
her once and for all; so she put on a slight air of
dignity which became her very well, and a little after
four o’clock the Victoria turned up the steep
little drive that led to the Vicarage.

III

Thee dusk was already fallen before Laurie, strolling
vaguely in the garden, heard the carriage wheels draw
up at the gate outside.

He had ridden again alone, and his mind had run, to
a certain extent, as might be expected, upon the recent
guest and her very startling conversation. He
was an intelligent young man, and he had not been in
the least taken in by her pseudo-mystical remarks.
Yet there had been something in her extreme assurance
that had affected him, as a man may smile sourly at
a good story in bad taste. His attitude, in fact,
was that of most Christians under the circumstances.
He did not, for an instant, believe that such things
really and literally happened, and yet it was difficult
to advance any absolutely conclusive argument against
them. Merely, they had not come his way; they
appeared to conflict with experience, and they usually
found as their advocates such persons as Mrs. Stapleton.

Two things, however, prevailed to keep the matter
before his mind. The first was his own sense
of loss, his own experience, sore and hot within him,
of the unapproachable emptiness of death; the second,
Maggie’s attitude. When a plainly sensible
and controlled young woman takes up a position of
superiority, she is apt, unless the young man in her
company happens to be in love with her—­and
sometimes even when he is—­to provoke and
irritate him into a camp of opposition. She is
still more apt to do so if her relations to him have
once been in the line of even greater tenderness.

Page 19

Laurie then was not in the most favorable of moods
to receive the dicta of the Vicar.

They were announced to him immediately after Mrs.
Baxter had received from Maggie’s hands her
first cup of tea.

“Mr. Rymer tells me it’s all nonsense,”
she said.

Laurie looked up.

“What?” he said.

“Mr. Rymer tells me Spiritualism is all nonsense.
He told me about someone called Eglingham, who kept
a beard in his portmanteau.”

“Eglinton, I think, auntie,” put in Maggie.

“I daresay, my dear. Anyhow, it’s
all the same. I felt sure it must be so.”
Laurie took a bun, with a thoughtful air.

“Does Mr. Rymer know very much about it, do
you think, mother?”

“Dear boy, I think he knows all that anyone
need know. Besides, if you come to think of it,
how could Cardinal Newman possibly appear in a drawing-room?
Particularly when Mrs. Stapleton says he isn’t
a Christian any longer.”

This had a possible and rather pleasing double interpretation;
but Laurie decided it was not worth while to be humorous.

“What about the Witch of Endor?” he asked
innocently, instead.

“That was in the Old Testament,” answered
his mother rapidly. “Mr. Rymer said something
about that too.”

“Oh! wasn’t it really Samuel who appeared?”

“Mr. Rymer thinks that things were permitted
then that are not permitted now.”

Laurie drank up his cup of tea. It is a humiliating
fact that extreme grief often renders the mourner
rather cross. There was a distinct air of crossness
about Laurie at this moment. His nerves were very
near the top.

“Well, that’s very convenient,”
he said. “Maggie, do you know if there’s
any book on Spiritualism in the house?”

The girl glanced uneasily near the fire-place.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Yes;
I think there’s something up there. I believe
I saw it the other day.”

Laurie rose and stood opposite the shelves.

“What color is it? (No, no more tea, thanks.)”

“Er ... black and red, I think,” said
the girl. “I forget.”

She looked up at him, faintly uneasy, as he very deliberately
drew down a book from the shelf and turned the pages.

“Yes ... this is it,” he said. “Thanks
very much.... No, really no more tea, thanks,
mother.”

Then he went to the door, with his easy, rather long
steps, and disappeared. They heard his steps
in the inner hall. Then a door closed overhead.

The end room, on the first floor, was Laurie’s
possession. It was a big place, with two windows,
and a large open fire, and he had skillfully masked
the fact that it was a bedroom by disposing his furniture,
with the help of a screen, in such a manner as completely
to hide the bed and the washing arrangements.

Page 20

The rest of the room he had furnished in a pleasing
male kind of fashion, with a big couch drawn across
the fire, a writing-table and chairs, a deep easy
chair near the door, and a long, high bookcase covering
the wall between the door and the windows. His
college oar, too, hung here, and there were pleasant
groups and pictures scattered on the other walls.

Maggie did not often come in here, except by invitation,
but about seven o’clock on this evening, half
an hour before she had to go and dress, she thought
she would look in on him for a few minutes. She
was still a little uncomfortable; she did not quite
know why: it was too ridiculous, she told, herself,
that a sensible boy like Laurie could be seriously
affected by what she considered the wicked nonsense
of Spiritualism.

Yet she went, telling herself that Laurie’s
grief was an excuse for showing him a little marked
friendliness. Besides, she would like to ask
him whether he was really going back to town on Thursday.

She tapped twice before an answer came; and then it
seemed a rather breathless voice which spoke.

The boy was sitting bolt upright on the edge of the
sofa, with a couple of candles at his side, and the
book in his hands. There was a strained and intensely
interested look in his eyes.

“May I come in for a few minutes? It’s
nearly dressing time,” she said.

“Oh—­er—­certainly.”

He got up, rather stiffly, still keeping his place
in the book with one finger, while she sat down.
Then he too sat again, and there was silence for a
moment.

“Why, you’re not smoking,” she said.

“I forgot. I will now, if you don’t
mind!”

She saw his fingers tremble a little as he put out
his hand to a box of cigarettes at his side.
But he put the book down, after looking at the page.

She could keep her question in no longer.

“What do you think of that,” she said,
nodding at the book.

He filled his lungs with smoke and exhaled again slowly.

“I think it’s extraordinary,” he
said shortly.

“In what way?”

Again he paused before answering. Then he answered
deliberately.

“If human evidence is worth anything, those
things happen,” he said.

“What things?”

“The dead return.”

Maggie looked at him, aware of his deliberate attempt
at dramatic brevity. He was watching the end
of his cigarette with elaborate attention, and his
face had that white, rather determined look that she
had seen on it once or twice before, in the presence
of a domestic crisis.

“Do you really mean you believe that?”
she said, with a touch of careful bitterness in her
voice.

“I do,” he said, “or else—­”

“Well?”

“Or else human evidence is worth nothing at
all.”

Maggie understood him perfectly; but she realized
that this was not an occasion to force issues.
She still put the tone of faint irony into her voice.

Page 21

“I really believe that it is possible to get
into touch with those whom we call dead. Each
instance, of course, depends on its own evidence.”

“And Cardinal Newman?”

“I have not studied the evidence for Cardinal
Newman,” remarked Laurie in a head-voice.

“Let’s have a look at that book,”
said Maggie impulsively.

He handed it to her; and she began to turn the pages,
pausing now and again to read a particular paragraph,
and once for nearly a minute while she examined an
illustration. Certainly the book seemed interestingly
written, and she read an argument or two that appeared
reasonably presented. Yet she was extraordinarily
repelled even by the dead paper and ink she had in
her hands. It was as if it was something obscene.
Finally she tossed it back on to the couch.

Laurie waited; but she said nothing.

“Well?” he asked at last, still refraining
from looking at her.

“I think it’s horrible,” she said.

Laurie delicately adjusted a little tobacco protruding
from his cigarette.

“Isn’t that a little unreasonable?”
he asked. “You’ve hardly looked at
it yet.”

Maggie knew this mood of his only too well. He
reserved it for occasions when he was determined to
fight. Argument was a useless weapon against
it.

“My dear boy,” she said with an effort,
“I’m sorry. I daresay it is unreasonable.
But that kind of thing does seem to me so disgusting.
That’s all.... I didn’t come to talk
about that.... Tell me—­”

“Didn’t you?” said Laurie.

Maggie was silent.

“Didn’t you?”

“Well—­yes I did. But I don’t
want to any more.”

Laurie smiled so that it might be seen.

“Well, what else did you want to say?”
He glanced purposely at the book. Maggie ignored
his glance.

“I just came to see how you were getting on.”

“How do you mean? With the book?”

“No; in every way.”

He looked up at her swiftly and suddenly, and she
saw that his agony of sorrow was acute beneath all
his attempts at superiority, his courteous fractiousness,
and his set face. She was filled suddenly with
an enormous pity.

“Oh! Laurie, I’m so sorry,”
she cried out. “Can’t I do anything?”

“Nothing, thanks; nothing at all,” he
said quietly.

Again pity and misery surged up within her, and she
cast all prudence to the winds. She had not realized
how fond she was of this boy till she saw once more
that look in his eyes.

“Oh! Laurie, you know I didn’t like
it; but—­but I don’t know what to
do, I’m so sorry. But don’t spoil
it all,” she said wildly, hardly knowing what
she feared.

“I beg your pardon?”

“You know what I mean. Don’t spoil
it, by—­by fancying things.”

“Maggie,” said the boy quietly, “you
must let me alone. You can’t help.”

IV

The ladies went to bed early at Stantons. At
ten o’clock precisely a clinking of bedroom
candlesticks was heard in the hall, followed by the
sound of locking doors. This was the signal.
Mrs. Baxter laid aside her embroidery with the punctuality
of a religious at the sound of a bell, and said two
words—­

“My dears.”

There were occasionally exclamatory expostulations
from the two at the piquet-table, but in nine cases
out of ten the game had been designed with an eye
upon the clock, and hardly any delay followed.
Mrs. Baxter kissed her son, and passed her arm through
Maggie’s. Laurie followed; gave them candles,
and generally took one himself.

But this evening there was no piquet. Laurie
had stayed later than usual in the dining-room, and
had wandered rather restlessly about when he had joined
the others. He looked at a London evening paper
for a little, paced about, vanished again, and only
returned as the ladies were making ready to depart.
Then he gave them their candlesticks, and himself
came back to the drawing room.

He was, in fact, in a far more perturbed and excited
mood than even Maggie had had any idea of. She
had interrupted him half-way through the book, but
he had read again steadily until five minutes before
dinner, and had, indeed, gone back again to finish
it afterwards. He had now finished it; and he
wanted to think.

It had had a surprising effect on him, coming as it
did upon a state of mind intensely stirred to its
depths by his sorrow. Crossness, as I have said,
had been the natural psychological result of his emotions;
but his emotions were none the less real. The
froth of whipped cream is real cream, after all.

Now Laurie had seen perfectly well the extreme unconvincingness
of Mrs. Stapleton, and had been genuine enough in
his little shrug of disapproval in answer to Maggie’s,
after lunch; yet that lady’s remarks had been
sufficient just to ignite the train of thought.
This train had smoldered in the afternoon, had been
fanned ever so slightly by two breezes—­the
sense of Maggie’s superiority and the faint
rebellious reaction which had come upon him with regard
to his personal religion. Certainly he had had
Mass said for Amy this morning; but it had been by
almost a superstitious rather than a religious instinct.
He was, in fact, in that state of religious unreality
which occasionally comes upon converts within a year
or two of the change of their faith. The impetus
of old association is absent, and the force of novelty
has died.

Page 23

Underneath all this then, it must be remembered that
the one thing that was intensely real to him was his
sense of loss of the one soul in whom his own had
been wrapped up. Even this afternoon as yesterday,
even this morning as he lay awake, he had been conscious
of an irresistible impulse to demand some sign, to
catch some glimpse of that which was now denied to
him.

It was in this mood that he had read the book; and
it is not to be wondered at that he had been excited
by it.

For it opened up to him, beneath all its sham mysticism,
its intolerable affectations, its grotesque parody
of spirituality—­of all of which he was
largely aware—­a glimmering avenue of a faintly
possible hope of which he had never dreamed—­a
hope, at least, of that half self-deception which
is so tempting to certain characters.

Here, in this book, written by a living man, whose
name and address were given, were stories so startling,
and theories so apparently consonant with themselves
and with other partly known facts—­stories
and theories, too, which met so precisely his own overmastering
desire, that it is little wonder that he was affected
by them.

Naturally, even during his reading, a thousand answers
and adverse comments had sprung to his mind—­suggestions
of fraud, of lying, of hallucination—­but
yet, here the possibility remained. Here were
living men and women who, with the usual complement
of senses and reason, declared categorically and in
detail, that on this and that date, in this place
and the other, after having taken all possible precautions
against fraud, they had received messages from the
dead—­messages of which the purport was understood
by none but themselves—­that they had seen
with their eyes, in sufficient light, the actual features
of the dead whom they loved, that they had even clasped
their hands, and held for an instant the bodies of
those whom they had seen die with their own eyes,
and buried.

* * * *
*

When the ladies’ footsteps had ceased to sound
overhead, Laurie went to the French window, opened
it, and passed on to the lawn.

He was astonished at the warmth of the September night.
The little wind that had been chilly this afternoon
had dropped with the coming of the dark, and high
overhead he could see the great masses of the leaves
motionless against the sky. He passed round the
house, and beneath the yews, and sat down on the garden
bench.

It was darker here than outside on the lawn.
Beneath his feet were the soft needles from the trees,
and above him, as he looked out, still sunk in his
thought, he could see the glimmer of a star or two
between the branches.

It was a fragrant, kindly night. From the hamlet
of half a dozen houses beyond the garden came no sound;
and the house, too, was still behind him. An
illuminated window somewhere on the first floor went
out as he looked at it, like a soul leaving a body;
once a sleepy bird somewhere in the shrubbery chirped
to its mate and was silent again.

Page 24

Then as he still labored in argument, putting this
against that, and weighing that against the other,
his emotion rose up in an irresistible torrent, and
all consideration ceased. One thing remained:
he must have Amy, or he must die.

* * * *
*

It was five or six minutes before he moved again from
that attitude of clenched hands and tensely strung
muscles into which his sudden passion had cast him.

During those minutes he had willed with his whole
power that she should come to him now and here, down
in this warm and fragrant darkness, hidden from all
eyes—­in this sweet silence, round which
sleep kept its guard. Such things had happened
before; such things must have happened, for the will
and the love of man are the mightiest forces in creation.
Surely again and again it had happened; there must
be somewhere in the world man after man who had so
called back the dead—­a husband sobbing
silently in the dark, a child wailing for his mother;
surely that force had before, in the world’s
history, willed back again from the mysterious dark
of space the dear personality that was all that even
heaven could give, had even compelled into a semblance
of life some sort of body to clothe it in. These
things must have happened—­only secrets
had been well kept.

So this boy had willed it; yet the dark had remained
empty; and no shadow, no faintly outlined face, had
even for an instant blotted out the star on which
he stared; no touch on his shoulder, no whisper in
his ear. It had seemed as he strove there, in
the silence, that it must be done; that there was
no limit to power concentrated and intense. Yet
it had not happened....

Once he had shuddered a little; and the very shudder
of fear had had in it a touch of delicious, trembling
expectation. Yet it had not happened.

Laurie relaxed his muscles therefore, let his breath
exhale in a long sigh, and once more remembered the
book he had read and Mrs. Stapleton’s feverish,
self-conscious thought.

Half an hour later his mother, listening in her bed,
heard his footsteps pass her room.

Chapter III

I

Lady Laura Bethell, spinster, had just returned to
her house in Queen’s Gate, with her dearest
friend, Mrs. Stapleton, for a few days of psychical
orgy. It was in her house, as much as in any in
London, that the modern prophets were to be met with—­severe-looking
women in shapeless dresses, little men and big, with
long hair and cloaks; and it was in her drawing-room
that tea and Queen cakes were dispensed to inquirers,
and papers read and discussed when the revels were
over.

Lady Laura herself was not yet completely emancipated
from what her friends sometimes called the grave-clothes
of so-called Revelation. To her it seemed a profound
truth that things could be true and untrue simultaneously—­that
what might be facts on This Side, as she would have
expressed it, might be falsehoods on the Other.
She was accustomed, therefore, to attend All Saints’,
Carlton Gardens, in the morning, and psychical drawing-rooms
or halls in the evening, and to declare to her friends
how beautifully the one aspect illuminated and interpreted
the other.

Page 25

For the rest, she was a small, fair-haired woman,
with penciled dark eyebrows, a small aquiline nose,
gold pince-nez, and an exquisite taste in dress.

The two were seated this Tuesday evening, a week after
Mrs. Stapleton’s visit to the Stantons, in the
drawing-room of the Queen’s Gate house, over
the remnants of what corresponded to five-o’clock
tea. I say “corresponded,” since both
of them were sufficiently advanced to have renounced
actual tea altogether. Mrs. Stapleton partook
of a little hot water out of a copper-jacketed jug;
her hostess of boiled milk. They shared their
Plasmon biscuits together. These things were
considered important for those who would successfully
find the Higher Light.

At this instant they were discussing Mr. Vincent.

“Dearest, he seems to me so different from the
others,” mewed Lady Laura. “He is
such a man, you know. So often those others are
not quite like men at all; they wear such funny clothes,
and their hair always is so queer, somehow.”

“Darling, I know what you mean. Yes, there’s
a great deal of that about James Vincent. Even
dear Tom was almost polite to him: he couldn’t
bear the others: he said that he always thought
they were going to paw him.”

“And then his powers,” continued Lady
Laura—­“his powers always seem to
me so much greater. The magnetism is so much more
evident.”

Mrs. Stapleton finished her hot water.

“We are going on Sunday?” she said questioningly.

“Yes; just a small party. And he comes
here tomorrow, you remember, just for a talk.
I have asked a clergyman I know in to meet him.
It seems to me such a pity that our religious teachers
should know so little of what is going on.”

“Who is he?”

“Oh, Mr. Jamieson ... just a young clergyman
I met in the summer. I promised to let him know
the next time Mr. Vincent came to me.”

Mrs. Stapleton murmured her gratification.

These two had really a great deal in common besides
their faith. It is true that Mrs. Stapleton was
forty, and her friend but thirty-one; but the former
did all that was possible to compensate for this by
adroit toilette tactics. Both, too, were accustomed
to dress in soft materials, with long chains bearing
various emblems; they did their hair in the same way;
they cultivated the same kinds of tones in their voices—­a
purring, mewing manner—­suggestive of intuitive
kittens. Both alike had a passion for proselytism.
But after that the differences began. There was
a deal more in Mrs. Stapleton besides the kittenish
qualities. She was perfectly capable of delivering
a speech in public; she had written some really well-expressed
articles in various Higher periodicals; and she had
a will-power beyond the ordinary. At the point
where Lady Laura began to deprecate and soothe, Mrs.
Stapleton began to clear decks for action, so to speak,
to be incisive, to be fervent, even to be rather eloquent.

Page 26

She kept “dear Tom,” the Colonel, not
crushed or beaten, for that was beyond the power of
man to do, but at least silently acquiescent in her
program: he allowed her even to entertain her
prophetical friends at his expense, now and then;
and, even when among men, refrained from too bitter
speech. It was said by the Colonel’s friends
that Mrs. Colonel had a tongue of her own. Certainly,
she ruled her house well and did her duty; and it
was only because of her husband’s absence in
Scotland that during this time she was permitting
herself the refreshment of a week or two among the
Illuminated.

At about six o’clock Lady Laura announced her
intention of retiring for her evening meditation.
Opening out of her bedroom was a small dressing-room
that she had fitted up for this purpose with all the
broad suggestiveness that marks the Higher Thought:
decked with ornaments emblematical of at least three
religions, and provided with a faldstool and an exceedingly
easy chair. It was here that she was accustomed
to spend an hour before dinner, with closed eyes,
emancipating herself from the fetters of sense; and
rising to a due appreciation of that Nothingness that
was All, from which All came and to which it retired.

“I must go, dearest; it is time.”

A ring at the bell below made her pause.

“Do you think that can be Mr. Vincent?”
she said, pleasantly apprehensive. “It’s
not the right day, but one never knows.”

A footman’s figure entered.

“Mr. Baxter, my lady.... Is your ladyship
at home?”

“Mr. Baxter—­”

Mrs. Stapleton rose.

“Let me see him instead, dearest.... You
remember ... from Stantons.”

“I wonder what he wants?” murmured the
hostess. “Yes, do see him, Maud; you can
always fetch me if it’s anything.”

Then she was gone. Mrs. Stapleton sank into a
chair again; and in a minute Laurie was shaking hands
with her.

Mrs. Stapleton was accustomed to deal with young men,
and through long habit had learned how to flatter
them without appearing to do so. Laurie’s
type, however, was less familiar to her. She preferred
the kind that grow their hair rather long and wear
turn-down collars, and have just found out the hopeless
banality of all orthodoxy whatever. She even
bore with them when they called themselves unmoral.
But she remembered Laurie, the silent boy at lunch
last week, she had even mentioned him to Lady Laura,
and received information about the village girl, more
or less correct. She was also aware that he was
a Catholic.

She gave him her hand without rising.

“Lady Laura asked me to excuse her absence to
you, Mr. Baxter. To be quite truthful, she is
at home, but had just gone upstairs for her meditation.”

“Indeed!”

“Yes, you know; we think that so important,
just as you do. Do sit down, Mr. Baxter.
You have had tea?”

“Yes, thanks.”

Page 27

“I hope she will be down before you go.
I don’t think she’ll be very long this
evening. Can I give her any message, Mr. Baxter,
in case you don’t see her?”

Laurie put his hat and stick down carefully, and crossed
his legs.

“No; I don’t think so, thanks,”
he said. “The fact is, I came partly to
find out your address, if I might.”

Mrs. Stapleton rustled and rearranged herself.

“Oh! but that’s charming of you,”
she said. “Is there anything particular?”

“Yes,” said Laurie slowly; “at least
it seems rather particular to me. It’s
what you were talking about the other day.”

“Now how nice of you to say that! Do you
know, I was wondering as we talked. Now do tell
me exactly what is in your mind, Mr. Baxter.”

Mrs. Stapleton was conscious of a considerable sense
of pleasure. Usually she found this kind of man
very imperceptive and gross. Laurie seemed perfectly
at his ease, dressed quite in the proper way, and had
an air of presentableness that usually only went with
Philistinism. She determined to do her best.

“Please, please,” she said, with that
touch of childish intensity that her friends thought
so innocent and beautiful.

“Well, it’s like this,” said Laurie.
“I’ve always rather disliked all that
kind of thing, more than I can say. It did seem
to me so—­well—­so feeble, don’t
you know; and then I’m a Catholic, you see,
and so—­”

“Yes; yes?”

“Well, I’ve been reading Mr. Stainton
Moses, and one or two other books; and I must say
that an awful lot of it seems to me still great rubbish;
and then there are any amount of frauds, aren’t
there, Mrs. Stapleton, in that line?”

“Alas! Ah, yes!”

“But then I don’t know what to make of
some of the evidence that remains. It seems to
me that if evidence is worth anything at all, there
must be something real at the back of it all.
And then, if that is so, if it really is true that
it is possible to get into actual touch with people
who are dead—­I mean really and truly, so
that there’s no kind of doubt about it—­well,
that does seem to me about the most important thing
in the world. Do you see?”

She kept her eyes on his face for an instant or two.
Plainly he was really moved; his face had gone a little
white in the lamplight and his hands were clasped
tightly enough over his knee to whiten the knuckles.
She remembered Lady Laura’s remarks about the
village girl, and understood. But she perceived
that she must not attempt intimacy just yet with this
young man: he would resent it. Besides, she
was shrewd enough to see by his manner that he did
not altogether like her.

She nodded pensively once or twice. Then she
turned to him with a bright smile. “I understand
entirely,” she said. “May I too speak
quite freely? Yes? Well, I am so glad you
have spoken out. Of course, we are quite accustomed
to being distrusted and feared. After all, it
is the privilege of all truth-seekers to suffer, is
it not? Well, I will say what is in my heart.

Page 28

“First, you are quite right about some of our
workers being dishonest sometimes. They are,
Mr. Baxter, I have seen more than one, myself, exposed.
But that is natural, is it not? Why, there have
been bad Catholics, too, have there not? And,
after all, we are only human; and there is a great
temptation sometimes not to send people away disappointed.
You have heard those stories, I expect, Mr. Baxter?”

“I have heard of Mr. Eglinton.”

“Ah! Poor Willie.... Yes. But
he had great powers, for all that.... Well, but
the point you want to get at is this, is it not?
Is it really true, underneath it all? Is that
it?”

Laurie nodded, looking at her steadily. She leaned
forward.

“Mr. Baxter, by all that I hold most sacred,
I assure you that it is, that I myself have seen and
touched ... touched ... my own father, who
crossed over twenty years ago. I have received
messages from his own lips ... and communications
in other ways too, concerning matters only known to
him and to myself. Is that sufficient? No”;
(she held up a delicate silencing hand) “...
no, I will not ask you to take my word. I will
ask you to test it for yourself.”

Laurie too leaned forward now in his low chair, his
hands clasped between his knees.

“You will—­you will let me test it?”
he said in a low voice.

She sat back easily, pushing her draperies straight.
She was in some fine silk that fell straight from
her high slender waist to her copper-colored shoes.

“Listen, Mr. Baxter. Tomorrow there is
coming to this house certainly the greatest medium
in London, if not in Europe. (Of course we cannot
compete with the East. We are only children beside
them.) Well, this man, Mr. Vincent—­I think
I spoke of him to you last week—­he is coming
here just for a talk to one or two friends. There
shall be no difficulty if you wish it. I will
speak to Lady Laura before you go.”

Laurie looked at her without moving.

“I shall be very much obliged,” he said.
“You will remember that I am not yet in the
least convinced? I only want to know.”

“That is exactly the right attitude. That
is all we have any right to ask. We do not ask
for blind faith, Mr. Baxter—­only for believing
after having seen.”

Laurie nodded slowly.

“That seems to me reasonable,” he said.

There was silence for a moment. Then she determined
on a bold stroke.

“There is someone in particular—­Mr.
Baxter—­forgive me for asking—­someone
who has passed over—?”

She sank her voice to what she had been informed was
a sympathetic tone, and was scarcely prepared for
the sudden tightening of that face.

“That is my affair, Mrs. Stapleton.”

Ah well, she had been premature. She would fetch
Lady Laura, she said; she thought she might venture
for such a purpose. No, she would not be away
three minutes. Then she rustled out.

Page 29

Laurie went to the fire to wait, and stood there,
mechanically warming his hands and staring down at
that sleeping core of red coal.

He had taken his courage in both hands in coming at
all. In spite of his brave words to Maggie, he
had been conscious of a curious repulsion with regard
to the whole matter—­a repulsion not only
of contempt towards the elaborate affectations of
the woman he had determined to consult. Yet he
had come.

What he had said just now had been perfectly true.
He was not yet in the least convinced, but he was
anxious, intensely and passionately anxious, goaded
too by desire.

Ah! surely it was absurd and fantastic—­here
in London, in this century. He turned and faced
the lamp-lit room, letting his eyes wander round the
picture-hung walls, the blue stamped paper, the Empire
furniture, the general appearance of beautiful comfort
and sane modern life. It was absurd and fantastic;
he would be disappointed again, as he had been disappointed
in everything else. These things did not happen—­the
dead did not return. Step by step those things
that for centuries had been deemed evidence of the
supernatural, one by one had been explained and discounted.
Hypnotism, water divining, witchcraft, and the rest.
All these had once been believed to be indisputable
proofs of a life beyond the grave, of strange supernormal
personalities, and these, one by one, had been either
accounted for or discredited. It was mad of him
to be alarmed or excited. No, he would go through
with it, expecting nothing, hoping nothing. But
he would just go through with it to satisfy himself....

The door opened, and the two ladies came in.

“I am delighted that you called, Mr. Baxter;
and on such an errand!”

Lady Laura put out a hand, tremulous with pleasure
at welcoming a possible disciple.

“Mrs. Stapleton has explained—­”
began Laurie.

“I understand everything. You come as a
skeptic—­no, not as a skeptic, but as an
inquirer, that is all that we wish.... Then tomorrow,
at about half-past four.”

Chapter IV

I

It was a mellow October afternoon, glowing towards
sunset, as Laurie came across the south end of the
park to his appointment next day; and the effect of
it upon his mind was singularly unsuggestive of supernatural
mystery. Instead, the warm sky, the lights beginning
to peep here and there, though an hour before sunset,
turned him rather in the direction of the natural
and the domestic.

He wondered what his mother and Maggie would say if
they knew his errand, for he had sufficient self-control
not to have told them of his intentions. As regards
his mother he did not care very much. Of course
she would deprecate it and feebly dissuade; but he
recognized that there was no particular principle
behind, beyond a sense of discomfort at the unknown.
But it was necessary for him to argue with himself

Page 30

about Maggie. The angry kind of contempt that
he knew she would feel needed an answer; and he gave
it by reminding himself that she had been brought
up in a convent-school, that she knew nothing of the
world, and that, lastly, he himself did not take the
matter seriously. He was aware, too, that the
instinctive repulsion that she felt so keenly found
a certain echo in his own feelings; but he explained
this by the novelty of the thing.

In fact, the attitude of mind in which he more or
less succeeded in arraying himself was that of one
who goes to see a serious conjurer. It would
be rather fun, he thought, to see a table dancing.
But there was not wholly wanting that inexplicable
tendency of some natures deliberately to deceive themselves
on what lies nearest to their hearts.

Mr. Vincent had not yet arrived when he was shown
upstairs, even though Laurie himself was late. (This
was partly deliberate. He thought it best to
show a little nonchalance.) There was only a young
clergyman in the room with the ladies; and the two
were introduced.

“Mr. Baxter—­Mr. Jamieson.”

He seemed a harmless young man, thought Laurie, and
plainly a little nervous at the situation in which
he found himself, as might a greyhound carry himself
in a kennel of well-bred foxhounds. He was very
correctly dressed, with Roman collar and stock, and
obviously had not long left a theological college.
He had an engaging kind of courtesy, ecclesiastically
cut features, and curly black hair. He sat balancing
a delicate cup adroitly on his knee.

“Mr. Jamieson is so anxious to know all that
is going on,” explained Lady Laura, with a voluble
frankness. “He thinks it so necessary to
be abreast of the times, as he said to me the other
day.”

Laurie assented, grimly pitying the young man for
his indiscreet confidences. The clergyman looked
priggish in his efforts not to do so.

“He has a class of young men on Sundays,”
continued the hostess—­“(Another biscuit,
Maud darling?)—­whom he tries to interest
in all modern movements. He thinks it so important.”

Mr. Jamieson cleared his throat in a virile manner.

“Just so,” he said; “exactly so.”

“And so I told him he must really come and meet
Mr. Vincent.... I can’t think why he is
so late; but he has so many calls upon his time, that
I am sure I wonder—­”

“Mr. Vincent,” announced the footman.

A rather fine figure of a man came forward into the
room, dressed in much better taste than Laurie somehow
had expected, and not at all like the type of an insane
dissenting minister in broadcloth which he had feared.
Instead, it was a big man that he saw, stooping a little,
inclined to stoutness, with a full curly beard tinged
with grey, rather overhung brows, and a high forehead,
from which the same kind of curly greyish hair was
beginning to retreat. He was in a well-cut frock-coat
and dark trousers, with the collar of the period and
a dark tie.

Page 31

Lady Laura was in a flutter of welcome, pouring out
little sentences, leading him to a seat, introducing
him, and finally pressing refreshments into his hands.

“It is too good of you,” she said; “too
good of you, with all your engagements.... These
gentlemen are most anxious.... Mrs. Stapleton
of course you know.... And you will just sit
and talk to us ... like friends ... won’t you....
No, no! no formal speech at all ... just a few words
... and you will allow us to ask you questions....”

And so on.

Meanwhile Laurie observed the high-priest carefully
and narrowly, and was quite unable to see any of the
unpleasant qualities he had expected. He sat
easily, without self-consciousness or arrogance or
unpleasant humility. He had a pair of pleasant,
shrewd, and rather kind eyes; and his voice, when
he said a word or two in answer to Lady Laura’s
volubility, was of that resonant softness that is always
a delight to hear. In fact, his whole bearing
and personality was that of a rather exceptional average
man—­a publisher, it might be, or a retired
lawyer—­a family man with a sober round of
life and ordinary duties, who brought to their fulfillment
a wholesome, kindly, but distinctly strong character
of his own. Laurie hardly knew whether he was
pleased or disappointed. He would almost have
preferred a wild creature with rolling eyes, in a
cloak; yet he would have been secretly amused and
contemptuous at such a man.

“The sitting is off for Sunday, by the way,
Lady Laura,” said the new-comer.

“Indeed! How is that?”

“Oh! there was some mistake about the rooms;
it’s the secretary’s fault; you mustn’t
blame me.”

Lady Laura cried out her dismay and disappointment,
and Mrs. Stapleton played chorus. It was too
tiresome, they said, too provoking, particularly
just now, when “Annie” was so complacent.
(Mrs. Stapleton explained kindly to the two young gentlemen
that “Annie” was a spirit who had lately
made various very interesting revelations.) What was
to be done? Were there no other rooms?

Mr. Vincent shook his head. It was too late,
he said, to make arrangements now.

While the ladies continued to buzz, and Mr. Jamieson
to listen from the extreme edge of his chair, Laurie
continued to make mental comments. He felt distinctly
puzzled by the marked difference between the prophet
and his disciples. These were so shallow; this
so impressive by the most ordinary of all methods,
and the most difficult of imitation, that is, by sheer
human personality. He could not grasp the least
common multiple of the two sides. Yet this man
tolerated these women, and, indeed, seemed very kind
and friendly towards them. He seemed to possess
that sort of competence which rises from the fact
of having well-arranged ideas and complete certitude
about them.

And at last a pause came. Mr. Vincent set down
his cup for the second time, refused buttered bun,
and waited.

Page 32

“Yes, do smoke, Mr. Vincent.”

The man drew out his cigarette-case, smiling, offering
it to the two men. Laurie took one; the clergyman
refused.

“And now, Mr. Vincent.”

Again he smiled, in a half-embarrassed way.

“But no speeches, I think you said,” he
remarked.

“Oh! well, you know what I mean; just like friends,
you know. Treat us all like that.”

Mrs. Stapleton rose, came nearer the circle, rustled
down again, and sank into an elaborate silence.

Laurie thought it time to explain himself a little.
He felt he would not like to take this man at an unfair
advantage.

“I should just like to say this,” he said.
“I have told Mrs. Stapleton already. It
is this. I must confess that so far as I am concerned
I am not a believer. But neither am I a skeptic.
I am just a real agnostic in this matter. I have
read several books; and I have been impressed.
But there’s a great deal in them that seems to
me nonsense; perhaps I had better say which I don’t
understand. This materializing business, for
instance.... I can understand that the minds of
the dead can affect ours; but I don’t see how
they can affect matter—­in table-rapping,
for instance, and still more in appearing, and our
being able to touch and see them.... I think that’s
my position,” he ended rather lamely.

The fact was that he was a little disconcerted by
the other’s eyes. They were, as I have
said, kind and shrewd eyes, but they had a good deal
of power as well. Mr. Vincent sat motionless during
this little speech, just looking at him, not at all
offensively, yet with the effect of making the young
man feel rather like a defiant and naughty little
boy who is trying to explain.

Laurie sat back and drew on his cigarette rather hard.

“I understand perfectly,” said the steady
voice. “You are in a very reasonable position.
I wish all were as open-minded. May I say a word
or two?”

“Please.”

“Well, it is materialization that puzzles you,
is it?”

“Exactly,” said Laurie. “Our
theologians tell us—­by the way, I am a
Catholic.” (The other bowed a little.) “Our
theologians, I believe, tell us that such a thing
cannot be, except under peculiar circumstances, as
in the lives of the saints, and so on.”

“Are you bound to believe all that your theologians
say?” asked the other quietly.

“Well, it would be very rash indeed—­”
began Laurie.

“Exactly, I see. But what if you approach
it from the other side, and try to find out instead
whether these things actually do happen. I do
not wish to be rude, Mr. Baxter; but you remember that
your theologians—­I am not so foolish as
to say the Church, for I know that that was not so—­but
your theologians, you know, made a mistake about Galileo.”

Page 33

“Now I don’t ask you to accept anything
contrary to your faith,” went on the other gently;
“but if you really wish to look into this matter,
you must set aside for the present all other presuppositions.
You must not begin by assuming that the theologians
are always right, nor even in asking how or why these
things should happen. The one point is, Do
they happen?”

His last words had a curious little effect as of a
sudden flame. He had spoken smoothly and quietly;
then he had suddenly put an unexpected emphasis into
the little sentence at the end. Laurie jumped,
internally. Yes, that was the point, he assented
internally.

“Now,” went on the other, again in that
slow, reassuring voice, flicking off the ash of his
cigarette, “is it possible for you to doubt
that these things happen? May I ask you what books
you have read?”

Laurie named three or four.

“And they have not convinced you?”

“Not altogether.”

“Yet you accept human evidence for a great many
much more remarkable things than these—­as
a Catholic.”

“That is Divine Revelation,” said Laurie,
sure of his ground.

“Pardon me,” said the other. “I
do not in the least say it is not Divine Revelation—­that
is another question—­but you receive the
statement that it is so, on the word of man. Is
that not true?”

Laurie was silent. He did not quite know what
to say; and he almost feared the next words.
But he was astonished that the other did not press
home the point.

“Think over that, Mr. Baxter. That is all
I ask. And now for the real thing. You sincerely
wish to be convinced?”

“I am ready to be convinced.”

The medium paused an instant, looking intently at
the fire. Then he tossed the stump of his cigarette
away and lighted another. The two ladies sat
motionless.

“You seem fond of a priori arguments,
Mr. Baxter,” he began, with a kindly smile.
“Let us have one or two, then.

“Consider first the relation of your soul to
your body. That is infinitely mysterious, is
it not? An emotion rises in your soul, and a
flush of blood marks it. That is the subconscious
mechanism of your body. But to say that, does
not explain it. It is only a label. You
follow me? Yes? Or still more mysterious
is your conscious power. You will to raise your
hand, and it obeys. Muscular action? Oh yes;
but that is but another label.” He turned
his eyes, suddenly somber, upon the staring, listening
young man, and his voice rose a little. “Go
right behind all that, Mr. Baxter, down to the mysteries.
What is that link between soul and body? You
do not know! Nor does the wisest scientist in
the world. Nor ever will. Yet there the link
is!”

Again he paused.

Laurie was aware of a rising half-excited interest
far beyond the power of the words he heard. Yet
the manner of these too was striking. It was
not the sham mysticism he had expected. There
was a certain reverence in them, an admitting of mysteries,
that seemed hard to reconcile with the ideas he had
formed of the dogmatism of these folk.

Page 34

“Now begin again,” continued the quiet,
virile voice. “You believe, as a Christian,
in the immortality of the soul, in the survival of
personality after death. Thank God for that!
All do not, in these days. Then I need not labor
at that.

“Now, Mr. Baxter, imagine to yourself some soul
that you have loved passionately, who has crossed
over to the other side.” Laurie drew a
long, noiseless breath, steadying himself with clenched
hands. “She has come to the unimaginable
glories, according to her measure; she is at an end
of doubts and fears and suspicions. She knows
because she sees.... But do you think that she
is absorbed in these things? You know nothing
of human love, Mr. Baxter” (the voice trembled
with genuine emotion) ... “if you can think
that...! If you can think that her thought turns
only to herself and her joys. Why, her life has
been lived in your love by our hypothesis—­you
were at her bedside when she died, perhaps; and she
clung to you as to God Himself, when the shadow deepened.
Do you think that her first thought, or at least her
second, will not be of you...? In all that she
sees, she will desire you to see it also. She
will strive, crave, hunger for you—­not that
she may possess you, but that you may be one with
her in her own possession; she will send out vibration
after vibration of sympathy and longing; and you,
on this side, will be tuned to her as none other can
be—­you, on this side, will be empty for
her love, for the sight and sound of her....
Is death then so strong?—­stronger than love?
Can a Christian believe that?”

The change in the man was extraordinary. His
heavy beard and brows hid half his face, but his whole
being glowed passionately in his voice, even in his
little trembling gestures, and Laurie sat astonished.
Every word uttered seemed to fit his own case, to express
by an almost perfect vehicle the vague thoughts that
had struggled in his own heart during this last week.
It was Amy of whom the man spoke, Amy with her eyes
and hair, peering from the glorious gloom to catch
some glimpse of her lover in his meaningless light
of earthly day.

Mr. Vincent cleared his throat a little, and at the
sound the two motionless women stirred and rustled
a little. The sound of a hansom, the spanking
trot and wintry jingle of bells swelled out of the
distance, passed, and went into silence before he spoke
again. Then it was in his usual slow voice that
he continued.

“Conceive such a soul as that, Mr. Baxter.
She desires to communicate with one she loves on earth,
with you or me, and it is a human and innocent desire.
Yet she has lost that connection, that machinery of
which we have spoken—­that connection of
which we know nothing, between matter and spirit,
except that it exists. What is she to do?
Well, at least she will do this, she will bend every
power that she possesses upon that medium—­I
mean matter—­through which alone the communication
can be made; as a man on an island, beyond the power
of a human voice, will use any instrument, however
grotesque, to signal to a passing ship. Would
any decent man, Mr. Baxter, mock at the pathos and
effort of that, even if it were some grotesque thing,
like a flannel shirt on the end of an oar? Yet
men mock at the tapping of a table...!

Page 35

“Well, then, this longing soul uses every means
at her disposal, concentrates every power she possesses.
Is it so very unreasonable, so very unchristian, so
very dishonoring to the love of God, to think that
she sometimes succeeds...? that she is able, under
comparatively exceptional circumstances, to re-establish
that connection with material things, that was perfectly
normal and natural to her during her earthly life....
Tell me, Mr. Baxter.”

Laurie shifted a little in his chair.

“I cannot say that it is,” he said, in
a voice that seemed strange in his own ears.
The medium smiled a little.

“So much for a priori reasoning,”
he said. “There remains only the fact whether
such things do happen or not. There I must leave
you to yourself, Mr. Baxter.”

Laurie sat forward suddenly.

“But that is exactly where I need your help,
sir,” he said.

A murmur broke from the ladies’ lips simultaneously,
resembling applause. Mr. Jamieson sat back and
swallowed perceptibly in his throat.

“You have said so much, sir,” went on
Laurie deliberately, “that you have, so to speak,
put yourself in my debt. I must ask you to take
me further.”

Mr. Vincent smiled full at him.

“You must take your place with others,”
he said. “These ladies—­”

“Mr. Vincent, Mr. Vincent,” cried Lady
Laura. “He is quite right, you must help
him. You must help us all.”

“If you can show me anything of this, sir, you
can surely show it now. If you do not show it
now—­”

“Well, Mr. Baxter?” put in the voice,
sharp and incisive, as if expecting an insult and
challenging it.

Laurie broke down.

“I can only say,” he cried, “that
I beg and entreat of you to do what you can—­now
and here.”

There was a silence.

“And you, Mr. Jamieson?”

The young clergyman started, as if from a daze.
Then he rose abruptly.

“I—­I must be going, Lady Laura,”
he said. “I had no idea it was so late.
I—­I have a confirmation class.”

An instant later he was gone.

“That is as well,” observed the medium.
“And you are sure, Mr. Baxter, that you wish
me to try? You must remember that I promise nothing.”

“I wish you to try.”

“And if nothing happens?”

“If nothing happens, I will promise to—­to
continue my search. I shall know then that—­that
it is at least sincere.”

Mr. Vincent rose to his feet.

“A little table just here, Lady Laura, if you
please, and a pencil and paper.... Will you kindly
take your seats...? Yes, Mr. Baxter, draw up
your chair ... here. Now, please, we must have
complete silence, and, so far as possible, silence
of thought.”

Page 36

II

The table, a small, round rosewood one, stood, bare
of any cloth, upon the hearthrug. The two ladies
sat, motionless statues once more, upon the side furthest
from the fire, with their hands resting lightly upon
the surface. Laurie sat on one side and the medium
on the other. Mr. Vincent had received his paper
and pencil almost immediately, and now sat resting
his right hand with the pencil upon the paper as if
to write, his left hand upon his knee as he sat, turned
away slightly from the center.

Laurie looked at him closely....

And now he began to be aware of a certain quite indefinable
change in the face at which he looked. The eyes
were open—­no, it was not in them that the
change lay, nor in the lines about the mouth, so far
as he could see them, nor in any detail, anywhere.
Neither was it the face of a dreamer or a sleepwalker,
or of the dead, when the lines disappear and life
retires. It was a living, conscious face, yet
it was changed. The lips were slightly parted,
and the breath came evenly between them. It was
more like the face of one lost in deep, absorbed,
introspective thought. Laurie decided that this
was the explanation.

He looked at the hand on the paper—­well
shaped, brownish, capable—­perfectly motionless,
the pencil held lightly between the finger and thumb.

Then he glanced up at the two ladies.

They too were perfectly motionless, but there was
no change in them. The eyes of both were downcast,
fixed steadily upon the paper. And as he looked
he saw Lady Laura begin to lift her lids slowly as
if to glance at him. He looked himself upon the
paper and the motionless fingers.

He was astonished at the speed with which the situation
had developed. Five minutes ago he had been listening
to talk, and joining in it. The clergyman had
been here; he himself had been sitting a yard further
back. Now they sat here as if they had sat for
an hour. It seemed that the progress of events
had stopped....

Then he began to listen for the sounds of the world
outside, for within here it seemed as if a silence
of a very strange quality had suddenly descended and
enveloped them. It was as if a section—­that
place in which he sat—­had been cut out of
time and space. It was apart here, it was different
altogether....

He began to be intensely and minutely conscious of
the world outside—­so entirely conscious
that he lost all perception of that at which he stared;
whether it was the paper, or the strong, motionless
hand, or the introspective face, he was afterwards
unaware. But he heard all the quiet roar of the
London evening, and was able to distinguish even the
note of each instrument that helped to make up that
untiring, inconclusive orchestra. Far away to
the northwards sounded a great thoroughfare, the rolling
of wheels, a myriad hoofs, the pulse of motor vehicles,
and the cries of street boys; upon all these his attention
dwelt as they came up through the outward windows
into that dead silent, lamp-lit room of which he had
lost consciousness. Again a hansom came up the
street, with the rap of hoofs, the swish of a whip,
the wintry jingle of bells....

Page 37

He began gently to consider these things, to perceive,
rather than to form, little inward pictures of what
they signified; he saw the lighted omnibus, the little
swirl of faces round a news-board.

Then he began to consider what had brought him here;
it seemed that he saw himself, coming in his dark
suit across the park, turning into the thoroughfare
and across it. He began to consider Amy; and it
seemed to him that in this intense and living silence
he was conscious of her for the first time without
sorrow since ten days ago. He began to consider.

* * * *
*

Something brought him back in an instant to the room
and his perception of it, but he had not an idea what
this was, whether a movement or a sound. But
on considering it afterwards he remembered that it
was as that sound is that wakes a man at the very instant
of his falling asleep, a sharp momentary tick, as
of a clock. Yet he had not been in the least
sleepy.

On the contrary, he perceived now with an extreme
and alert attention the hand on the paper; he even
turned his head slightly to see if the pencil had
moved. It was as motionless as at the beginning.
He glanced up, with a touch of surprise, at his hostess’s
face, and caught her in the very act of turning her
eyes from his. There was no impatience in her
movement: rather her face was of one absorbed,
listening intently, not like the bearded face opposite,
introspective and intuitive, but eagerly, though motionlessly,
observant of the objective world. He looked at
Mrs. Stapleton. She too bore the same expression
of intent regarding thought on her usually rather
tiresome face.

Then once again the silence began to come down, like
a long, noiseless hush.

This time, however, his progress was swifter and more
sure. He passed with the speed of thought through
those processes that had been measurable before, faintly
conscious of the words spoken before the sitting began—­

“... If possible, the silence of thought.”

He thought he understood now what this signified,
and that he was experiencing it. No longer did
he dwell upon, or consider, with any voluntary activity,
the images that passed before him. Rather they
moved past him while he simply regarded them without
understanding. His perception ran swiftly outwards,
as through concentric circles, yet he was not sure
whether it were outwards or inwards that he went.
The roar of London, with its flight of ocular visions,
sank behind him, and without any further sense of
mental travel, he found himself perceiving his own
home, whether in memory, imagination, or fact he did
not know. But he perceived his mother, in the
familiar lamp-lit room, over her needlework, and Maggie—­Maggie
looking at him with a strange, almost terrified expression
in her great eyes. Then these too were gone;
and he was out in some warm silence, filled with a
single presence—­that which he desired;
and there he stopped.

Page 38

* * * *
*

He was not in the least aware of how long this lasted.
But he found himself at a certain moment in time,
looking steadily at the white paper on the table,
from which the hand had gone, again conscious of the
sudden passing of some clear sound that left no echo—­as
sharp as the crack of a whip. Oh! the paper—­that
was the important point! He bent a little closer,
and was aware of a sharp disappointment as he saw
it was stainless of writing. Then he was astonished
that the hand and pencil had gone from it, and looked
up quickly.

Mr. Vincent was looking at him with a strange expression.

At first he thought he might have interrupted, and
wondered with dismay whether this were so. But
there was no sign of anger in those eyes—­nothing
but a curious and kindly interest.

“Nothing happened?” he exclaimed hastily.
“You have written nothing?”

He looked at the ladies.

Lady Laura too was looking at him with the same strange
interest as the medium. Mrs. Stapleton, he noticed,
was just folding up, in an unobtrusive manner, several
sheets of paper that he had not noticed before.

He felt a little stiff, and moved as if to stand up
but, to his astonishment, the big man was up in an
instant, laying his hands on his shoulders.

“Just sit still quietly for a few minutes,”
said the kindly voice. “Just sit still.”

“Why—­why—­” began
Laurie, bewildered.

“Yes, just sit still quietly,” went on
the voice; “you feel a little tired.”

“Just a little,” said Laurie. “But—­”

“Yes, yes; just sit still. No; don’t
speak.”

Then a silence fell again.

Laurie began to wonder what this was all about.
Certainly he felt tired, yet strangely elated.
But he felt no inclination to move; and sat back,
passive, looking at his own hands on his knees.
But he was disappointed that nothing had happened.

Then the thought of time came into his mind.
He supposed that it would be about ten minutes past
six. The sitting had begun a little before six.
He glanced up at the clock on the mantelpiece; but
it was one of those bulgy-faced Empire gilt affairs
that display everything except the hour. He still
waited a moment, feeling all this to be very unusual
and unconventional. Why should he sit here like
an invalid, and why should these three sit here and
watch him so closely?

He shifted a little in his chair, feeling that an
effort was due from him. The question of the
time of day struck him as a suitably conventional
remark with which to break the embarrassing silence.

“What is the time?” he said. “I
am afraid I ought to be—­”

“There is plenty of time,” said the grave
voice across the table.

With a sudden movement Laurie was on his feet, peering
at the clock, knowing that something was wrong somewhere.
Then he turned to the company bewildered and suspicious.

Page 39

“Why, it is nearly eight,” he cried.

Mr. Vincent smiled reassuringly.

“It is about that,” he said. “Please
sit down again, Mr. Baxter.”

“But—­but—­” began
Laurie.

“Please sit down again, Mr. Baxter,” repeated
the voice, with a touch of imperiousness that there
was no resisting.

Laurie sat down again; but he was alert, suspicious,
and intensely puzzled.

“Will you kindly tell me what has happened?”
he asked sharply.

“You feel tired?”

“No; I am all right. Kindly tell me what
has happened.”

He saw Lady Laura whisper something in an undertone
he could not hear. Mr. Vincent stood up with
a nod and leaned himself against the mantelpiece,
looking down at the rather indignant young man.

“Certainly,” he said. “You
are sure you are not exhausted, Mr. Baxter?”

“Not in the least,” said Laurie.

“Well, then, you passed into trance about five
minutes—­”

“What?”

“You passed into trance about five minutes past
six; you came out of it five minutes ago.”

“Trance?” gasped Laurie.

“Certainly. A very deep and satisfactory
trance. There is nothing to be frightened of,
Mr. Baxter. It is an unusual gift, that is all.
I have seldom seen a more satisfactory instance.
May I ask you a question or two, sir?”

Laurie nodded vaguely. He was still trying hopelessly
to take in what had been said.

“You nearly passed into trance a little earlier.
May I ask whether you heard or saw anything that recalled
you?”

Laurie shut his eyes tight in an effort to think.
He felt dimly rather proud of himself.

“It was quite short. Then you came back
and looked at Lady Laura. Try to remember.”

“I remember thinking I had heard a sound.”

The medium nodded.

“Just so,” he said.

“That would be the third,” said Lady Laura,
nodding sagely.

“Third what?” said Laurie rather rudely.

No one paid any attention to him.

“Now can you give any account of the last hour
and a half?” continued the medium tranquilly.

Laurie considered again. He was still a little
confused.

“I remember thinking about the streets,”
he said, “and then of my own home, and then...”
He stopped.

“Yes; and then?”

“Then of a certain private matter.”

“Ah! We must not pry then. But can
you answer one question more? Was it connected
with any person who has crossed over?”

“It was,” said Laurie shortly.

“Just so,” said the medium.

Laurie felt suspicious.

“Why do you ask that?” he said.

Mr. Vincent looked at him steadily.

“I think I had better tell you, Mr. Baxter;
it is more straightforward, though you will not like
it. You will be surprised to hear that you talked
very considerably during this hour and a half; and
from all that you said I should suppose you were controlled
by a spirit recently crossed over—­a young
girl who on being questioned gave the name of Amy
Nugent—­”

Page 40

Laurie sprang to his feet, furious.

“You have been spying, sir. How dare you—­”

“Sit down, Mr. Baxter, or you shall not hear
a word more,” rang out the imperious, unruffled
voice. “Sit down this instant.”

Laurie shot a look at the two ladies. Then he
remembered himself. He sat down.

“I am not at all angry, Mr. Baxter,” came
the voice, suave and kindly again. “Your
thought was very natural. But I think I can prove
to you that you are mistaken.”

Mr. Vincent glanced at Mrs. Stapleton with an almost
imperceptible frown, then back at Laurie.

“Let me see, Mr. Baxter.... Is there anyone
on earth besides yourself who knew that you had sat
out, about ten days ago or so, under some yew trees
in your garden at home, and thought of this young girl—­that
you—­”

Laurie looked at him in dumb dismay; some little sound
broke from his mouth.

“Well, is that enough, Mr. Baxter?”

Lady Laura slid in a sentence here.

“Dear Mr. Baxter, you need not be in the least
alarmed. All that has passed here is, of course,
as sacred as in the confessional. We should not
dream, without your leave—­”

“One moment,” gasped the boy.

He drove his face into his hands and sat overwhelmed.

Presently he looked up.

“But I knew it,” he said. “I
knew it. It was just my own self which spoke.”

The medium smiled.

“Yes,” he said, “of course that
is the first answer.” He placed one hand
on the table, leaning forward, and began to play his
fingers as if on a piano. Laurie watched the
movement, which seemed vaguely familiar.

“Can you account for that, Mr. Baxter?
You did that several times. It seemed uncharacteristic
of you, somehow.”

Laurie looked at him, mute. He remembered now.
He half raised a hand in protest.

Page 41

“You must not lose sight of that young man,”
he said abruptly. “It is an extraordinary
case.”

“I have all the notes here,” remarked
Mrs. Stapleton.

“Yes; you had better keep them. He must
not see them at present.”

Chapter V

I

As the weeks went by Maggie’s faint uneasiness
disappeared. She was one of those fortunate persons
who, possessing what are known as nerves, are aware
of the possession, and discount their effects accordingly.

That uneasiness had culminated a few days after Laurie’s
departure one evening as she sat with the old lady
after tea—­in a sudden touch of terror at
she knew not what.

“What is the matter, my dear?” the old
lady had said without warning.

Maggie was reading, but it appeared that Mrs. Baxter
had noticed her lower her book suddenly, with an odd
expression.

Maggie had blinked a moment.

“Nothing,” she said. “I was
just thinking of Laurie; I don’t know why.”

But since then she had been able to reassure herself.
Her fancies were but fancies, she told herself; and
they had ceased to trouble her. The boy’s
letters to his mother were ordinary and natural:
he was reading fairly hard; his coach was as pleasant
a person as he had seemed; he hoped to run down to
Stantons for a few days at Christmas. There was
nothing whatever to alarm anyone; plainly his ridiculous
attitude about Spiritualism had been laid by; and,
better still, he was beginning to recover himself
after his sorrow in September.

It was an extraordinarily peaceful and uneventful
life that the two led together—­the kind
of life that strengthens previous proclivities and
adds no new ones; that brings out the framework of
character and motive as dropping water clears the
buried roots of a tree. This was all very well
for Mrs. Baxter, whose character was already fully
formed, it may be hoped; but not so utterly satisfactory
for the girl, though the process was pleasant enough.

After Mass and breakfast she spent the morning as
she wished, overseeing little extra details of the
house—­gardening plans, the poultry, and
so forth—­and reading what she cared to.
The afternoon was devoted to the old lady’s
airing; the evening till dinner to anything she wished;
and after dinner again to gentle conversation.
Very little happened. The Vicar and his wife dined
there occasionally, and still more occasionally Father
Mahon. Now and then there were vague entertainments
to be patronized in the village schoolroom, in an
atmosphere of ink and hair-oil, and a mild amount of
rather dreary and stately gaiety connected with the
big houses round. Mrs. Baxter occasionally put
in appearances, a dignified and aristocratic old figure
with her gentle eyes and black lace veil; and Maggie
went with her.

Page 42

The pleasure of this life grew steadily upon Maggie.
She was one of that fraction of the world that finds
entertainment to lie, like the kingdom of God, within.
She did not in the least wish to be “amused”
or stimulated and distracted. She was perfectly
and serenely content with the fowls, the garden, her
small selected tasks, her religion, and herself.

The result was, as it always is in such cases, she
began to revolve about three or four main lines of
thought, and to make a very fair progress in the knowledge
of herself. She knew her faults quite well; and
she was not unaware of her virtues. She knew perfectly
that she was apt to give way to internal irritation,
of a strong though invisible kind, when interruptions
happened; that she now and then gave way to an unduly
fierce contempt of tiresome people, and said little
bitter things that she afterwards regretted. She
also knew that she was quite courageous, that she
had magnificent physical health, and that she could
be perfectly content with a life that a good many
other people would find narrow and stifling.

Her own character then was one thing that she had
studied—­not in the least in a morbid way—­during
her life at Stantons. And another thing she was
beginning to study, rather to her own surprise, was
the character of Laurie. She began to become
a little astonished at the frequency with which, during
a silent drive, or some mild mechanical labor in the
gardens, the image of that young man would rise before
her.

Indeed, as has been said, she had new material to
work on. She had not realized till the affaire
Amy that boy’s astonishing selfishness; and
it became for her a rather pleasant psychological exercise
to build up his characteristics into a consistent
whole. It had not struck her, till this specimen
came before her notice, how generosity and egotism,
for example, so far from being mutually exclusive,
can very easily be complements, each of the other.

So then she passed her days—­exteriorly
a capable and occupied person, interested in half
a dozen simple things; interiorly rather introspective,
rather scrupulous, and intensely interested in the
watching of two characters—­her own and her
adopted brother’s. Mrs. Baxter’s
character needed no dissection; it was a consistent
whole, clear as crystal and as rigid.

It was still some five weeks before Christmas that
Maggie became aware of what, as a British maiden,
she ought, of course, to have known long before—­namely,
that she was thinking just a little too much about
a young man who, so far as was apparent, thought nothing
at all about her. It was true that once he had
passed through a period of sentimentality in her regard;
but the extreme discouragement it had met with had
been enough.

Her discovery happened in this way.

Mrs. Baxter opened a letter one morning, smiling contentedly
to herself.

“From Laurie,” she said. Maggie ceased
eating toast for a second, to listen.

Page 43

Then the old lady uttered a small cry of dismay.

“He thinks he can’t come, after all,”
she said.

Maggie had a moment of very acute annoyance.

“What does he say? Why not?” she
asked.

There was a pause. She watched Mrs. Baxter’s
lips moving slowly, her glasses in place; saw the
page turned, and turned again. She took another
piece of toast. There are few things more irritating
than to have fragments of a letter doled out piecemeal.

“He doesn’t say. He just says he’s
very busy indeed, and has a great deal of way to make
up.” The old lady continued reading tranquilly,
and laid the letter down.

“Nothing more?” asked Maggie, consumed
with annoyance.

“He’s been to the theatre once or twice....
Dear Laurie! I’m glad he’s recovering
his spirits.”

Maggie was very angry indeed. She thought it
abominable of the boy to treat his mother like that.
And then there was the shooting—­not much,
indeed, beyond the rabbits, which the man who acted
as occasional keeper told her wanted thinning, and
a dozen or two of wild pheasants—­yet this
shooting had always been done, she understood, at
Christmas, ever since Master Laurie had been old enough
to hold a gun.

She determined to write him a letter.

When breakfast was over, with a resolved face she
went to her room. She would really tell this
boy a home-truth or two. It was a—­a
sister’s place to do so. The mother, she
knew well enough, would do no more than send a little
wail, and would end by telling the dear boy that,
of course, he knew best, and that she was very happy
to think that he was taking such pains about his studies.
Someone must point out to the boy his overwhelming
selfishness, and it seemed that no one was at hand
but herself. Therefore she would do it.

She did it, therefore, politely enough but unmistakably;
and as it was a fine morning, she thought that she
would like to step up to the village and post it.
She did not want to relent; and once the letter was
in the post-box, the thing would be done.

It was, indeed, a delicious morning. As she passed
out through the iron gate the trees overhead, still
with a few brown belated leaves, soared up in filigree
of exquisite workmanship into a sky of clear November
blue, as fresh as a hedge-sparrow’s egg.
The genial sound of cock-crowing rose, silver and
exultant, from the farm beyond the road, and the tiny
street of the hamlet looked as clean as a Dutch picture.

She noticed on the right, just before she turned up
to the village on the left, the grocer’s shop,
with the name “Nugent” in capitals as
bright and flamboyant as on the depot of a merchant
king. Mr. Nugent could be faintly descried within,
in white shirt-sleeves and an apron, busied at a pile
of cheeses. Overhead, three pairs of lace curtains,
each decked with a blue bow, denoted the bedrooms.
One of them must have been Amy’s. She wondered
which....

Page 44

All up the road to the village, some half-mile in
length, she pondered Amy. She had never seen
her, to her knowledge; but she had a tolerably accurate
mental picture of her from Mrs. Baxter’s account....
Ah! how could Laurie? How could he...? Laurie,
of all people! It was just one more example....

After dropping her letter into the box at the corner,
she hesitated for an instant. Then, with an odd
look on her face, she turned sharply aside to where
the church tower pricked above the leafless trees.

It was a typical little country church, with that
odor of the respectable and rather stuffy sanctity
peculiar to the class; she had wrinkled her nose at
it more than once in Laurie’s company. But
she passed by the door of it now, and, stepping among
the wet grasses, came down the little slope among
the headstones to where a very white marble angel
clasped an equally white marble cross. She passed
to the front of this, and looked, frowning a little
over the intolerable taste of the thing.

The cross, she perceived, was wreathed with a spray
of white marble ivory; the angel was a German female,
with a very rounded leg emerging behind a kind of
button; and there, at the foot of the cross, was the
inscription, in startling black—­

AMY NUGENT

THE DEAR AND ONLY DAUGHTER

OF

AMOS AND MARIA NUGENT

OF STANTONS

DIED SEPTEMBER 21st 1901

RESPECTED BY ALL

"I SHALL SEE HER BUT NOT NOW."

Below, as vivid as the inscription, there stood out
the maker’s name, and of the town where he lived.

* * * *
*

So she lay there, reflected Maggie. It had ended
in that. A mound of earth, cracking a little,
and sunken. She lay there, her nervous fingers
motionless and her stammer silent. And could there
be a more eloquent monument of what she was...?
Then she remembered herself, and signed herself with
the cross, while her lips moved an instant for the
repose of the poor girlish soul. Then she stepped
up again on to the path to go home.

It was as she came near the church gate that she understood
herself, that she perceived why she had come, and
was conscious for the first time of her real attitude
of soul as she had stood there, reading the inscription,
and, in a flash, there followed the knowledge of the
inevitable meaning of it all.

In a word it was this.

She had come there, she told herself, to triumph,
to gloat. Oh! she spared herself nothing, as
she stood there, crimson with shame, to gloat over
the grave of a rival. Amy was nothing less than
that, and she herself—­she, Margaret Marie
Deronnais—­had given way to jealousy of
this grocer’s daughter, because ... because ...
she had begun to care, really to care, for the man
to whom she had written that letter this morning,
and this man had scarcely said one word to her, or
given her one glance, beyond such as a brother might
give to a sister. There was the naked truth.

Page 45

Her mind fled back. She understood a hundred
things now. She perceived that that sudden anger
at breakfast had been personal disappointment—­not
at all that lofty disinterestedness on behalf of the
mother that she had pretended. She understood
too, now, the meaning of those long contented meditations
as she went up and down the garden walks, alert for
plantains, the meaning of the zeal she had shown, only
a week ago, on behalf of a certain hazel which the
gardener wanted to cut down.

“You had better wait till Mr. Laurence comes
home,” she had said. “I think he
once said he liked the tree to be just there.”

She understood now why she had been so intuitive,
so condemnatory, so critical of the boy—­it
was that she was passionately interested in him, that
it was a pleasure even to abuse him to herself, to
call him selfish and self-centered, that all this
lofty disapproval was just the sop that her subconsciousness
had used to quiet her uneasiness.

Little scenes rose before her—­all passed
almost in a flash of time—­as she stood
with her hand on the medieval-looking latch of the
gate, and she saw herself in them all as a proud, unmaidenly,
pharisaical prig, in love with a man who was not in
love with her.

She made an effort, unlatched the gate, and moved
on, a beautiful, composed figure, with great steady
eyes and well-cut profile, a model of dignity and
grace, interiorly a raging, self-contemptuous, abject
wretch.

It must be remembered that she was convent-bred.

II

By the time that Laurie’s answer came, poor
Maggie had arranged her emotions fairly satisfactorily.
She came to the conclusion, arrived at after much
heart-searching, that after all she was not yet actually
in love with Laurie, but was in danger of being so,
and that therefore now that she knew the danger, and
could guard against it, she need not actually withdraw
from her home, and bury herself in a convent or the
foreign mission-field.

She arrived at this astonishing conclusion by the
following process of thought. It may be presented
in the form of a syllogism.

All girls who are in love regard the beloved
as a spotless,
reproachless hero.

Maggie Deronnais did not regard Laurie
Baxter as a spotless,
reproachless hero.

Ergo. Maggie Deronnais was not
in love with Laurie Baxter.

Strange as it may appear to non-Catholic readers,
Maggie did not confide her complications to the ear
of Father Mahon. She mentioned, no doubt, on
the following Saturday, that she had given way to
thoughts of pride and jealousy, that she had deceived
herself with regard to a certain action, done really
for selfish motives, into thinking she had done it
for altruistic motives, and there she left it.
And, no doubt, Father Mahon left it there too, and
gave her absolution without hesitation.

Page 46

Then Laurie’s answer arrived, and had to be
dealt with, that is, it had to be treated interiorly
with a proper restraint of emotions.

“My dear Maggie,”
he wrote;

Why all this fury? What have I
done? I said to mother that I didn’t
know for certain whether I could come or not, as I
had a lot to do. I don’t think she can have
given you the letter to read, or you wouldn’t
have written all that about my being away from
home at the one season of the year, etc.
Of course I’ll come, if you or anybody feels
like that. Does mother feel upset too?
Please tell me if she ever feels that, or is in
the least unwell, or anything. I’ll
come instantly. As it is, shall we say the 20th
of December, and I’ll stay at least a week.
Will that do?

Yours,
L.B.

This was a little overwhelming, and Maggie wrote off
a penitent letter, refraining carefully, however,
from any expressions that might have anything of the
least warmth, but saying that she was very glad he
was coming, and that the shooting should be seen to.

She directed the letter; and then sat for an instant
looking at Laurie’s—­at the neat Oxford-looking
hand, the artistic appearance of the paragraphs, and
all the rest of it.

She would have liked to keep it—­to put
it with half a dozen others she had from him; but
it seemed better not.

Then as she tore it up into careful strips, her conscience
smote her again, shrewdly; and she drew out the top
left-hand drawer of the table at which she sat.

There they were, a little pile of them, neat and orderly.
She looked at them an instant; then she took them
out, turned them quickly to see if all were there,
and then, gathering up the strips of the one she had
received that morning, went over to the wood fire and
dropped them in.

It was better so, she said to herself.

* * * *
*

The days went pleasantly enough after that. She
would not for an instant allow to herself that any
of their smoothness arose from the fact that this
boy would be here again in a few weeks. On the
contrary, it was because she had detected a weakness
in his regard, she told herself, and had resolutely
stamped on it, that she was in so serene a peace.
She arranged about the shooting—­that is
to say, she informed the acting keeper that Master
Laurie would be home for Christmas as usual—­all
in an unemotional manner, and went about her various
affairs without effort.

She found Mrs. Baxter just a little trying now and
then. That lady had come to the conclusion that
Laurie was unhappy in his religion—­certainly
references to it had dropped out of his letters—­and
that Mr. Rymer must set it right.

“The Vicar must dine here at least twice while
Laurie is here,” she observed at breakfast one
morning. “He has a great influence with
young men.”

Maggie reflected upon a remark or two, extremely unjust,
made by Laurie with regard to the clergyman.

“And—­and what do you think Mr. Rymer
will be able to do?” asked the girl.

“Just settle the boy.... I don’t
think Laurie’s very happy. Not that I would
willingly disturb his mind again; I don’t mean
that, my dear. I quite understand that your religion
is just the one for certain temperaments, and Laurie’s
is one of them; but a few helpful words sometimes—­”
Mrs. Baxter left it at an aposiopesis, a form of speech
she was fond of.

There was a grain of truth, Maggie thought, in the
old lady’s hints, and she helped herself in
silence to marmalade. Laurie’s letters,
which she usually read, did not refer much to religion,
or to the Brompton Oratory, as his custom had been
at first. She tried to make up her mind that
this was a healthy sign; that it showed that Laurie
was settling down from that slight feverishness of
zeal that seemed the inevitable atmosphere of most
converts. Maggie found converts a little trying
now and then; they would talk so much about facts,
certainly undisputed, and for that very reason not
to be talked about. Laurie had been a marked
case, she remembered; he wouldn’t let the thing
alone, and his contempt of Anglican clergy, whom Maggie
herself regarded with respect, was hard to understand.
In fact she had remonstrated on the subject of the
Vicar....

Maggie perceived that she was letting her thoughts
run again on disputable lines; and she made a remark
about the Balkan crisis so abruptly that Mrs. Baxter
looked at her in bewilderment.

“You do jump about so, my dear. We were
speaking of Laurie, were we not?”

“Yes,” said Maggie.

“It’s the twentieth he’s coming
on, is it not?”

“Yes,” said Maggie.

“I wonder what train he’ll come by?”

“I don’t know,” said Maggie.

* * * *
*

A few days before Laurie’s arrival she went
to the greenhouse to see the chrysanthemums.
There was an excellent show of them.

“Mrs. Baxter doesn’t like them hairy ones,”
said the gardener.

“Oh! I had forgotten. Well, Ferris,
on the nineteenth I shall want a big bunch of them.
You’d better take those—­those hairy
ones. And some maidenhair. Is there plenty?”

“Yes, miss.”

“Can you make a wreath, Ferris?”

“Yes, miss.”

“Well, will you make a good wreath of them,
please, for a grave? The morning of the twentieth
will do. There’ll be plenty left for the
church and house?”

“Oh yes, miss.”

“And for Father Mahon?”

“Oh yes, miss.”

“Very well, then. Will you remember that?
A good wreath, with fern, on the morning of the twentieth.
If you’ll just leave it here I’ll call
for it about twelve o’clock. You needn’t
send it up to the house.”

Page 48

Chapter VI

I

Laurie was sitting in his room after breakfast, filling
his briar pipe thoughtfully, and contemplating his
journey to Stantons.

It was more than six weeks now since his experience
in Queen’s Gate, and he had gone through a variety
of emotions. Bewildered terror was the first,
a nervous interest the next, a truculent skepticism
the third; and lately, to his astonishment, the nervous
interest had begun to revive.

At first he had been filled with unreasoning fear.
He had walked back as far as the gate of the park,
hardly knowing where he went, conscious only that
he must be in the company of his fellows; upon finding
himself on the south side of Hyde Park Corner, where
travelers were few, he had crossed over in nervous
haste to where he might jostle human beings.
Then he had dined in a restaurant, knowing that a
band would be playing there, and had drunk a bottle
of champagne; he had gone to his rooms, cheered and
excited, and had leapt instantly into bed for fear
that his courage should evaporate. For he was
perfectly aware that fear, and a sickening kind of
repulsion, formed a very large element in his emotions.
For nearly two hours, unless three persons had lied
consummately, he—­his essential being, that
sleepless self that underlies all—­had been
in strange company, had become identified in some
horrible manner with the soul of a dead person.
It was as if he had been informed some morning that
he had slept all night with a corpse under his bed.
He woke half a dozen times that night in the pleasant
curtained bedroom, and each time with the terror upon
him. What if stories were true, and this Thing
still haunted the air? It was remarkable, he
considered afterwards, how the sign which he had demanded
had not had the effect for which he had hoped.
He was not at all reassured by it.

Then as the days went by, and he was left in peace,
his horror began to pass. He turned the thing
over in his mind a dozen times a day, and found it
absorbing. But he began to reflect that, after
all, he had nothing more than he had had before in
the way of evidence. An hypnotic sleep might
explain the whole thing. That little revelation
he had made in his unconsciousness, of his sitting
beneath the yews, might easily be accounted for by
the fact that he himself knew it, that it had been
a deeper element in his experience than he had known,
and that he had told it aloud. It was no proof
of anything more. There remained the rapping
and what the medium had called his “appearance”
during the sleep; but of all this he had read before
in books. Why should he be convinced any more
now than he had been previously? Besides, it
was surely doubtful, was it not, whether the rapping,
if it had really taken place, might not be the normal
cracks and sounds of woodwork, intensified in the
attention of the listeners? or if it was more than
this, was there any proof that it might not be produced
in some way by the intense will-power of some living
person present? This was surely conceivable—­more
conceivable, that is, than any other hypothesis....
Besides, what had it all got to do with Amy?

Page 49

Within a week of his original experience, skepticism
was dominant. These lines of thought did their
work by incessant repetition. The normal life
he lived, the large, businesslike face of the lawyer
whom he faced day by day, a theatre or two, a couple
of dinners—­even the noise of London streets
and the appearance of workaday persons—­all
these gradually reassured him.

When therefore he received a nervous little note from
Lady Laura, reminding him of the seance to
be held in Baker Street, and begging his attendance,
he wrote a most proper letter back again, thanking
her for her kindness, but saying that he had come
to the conclusion that this kind of thing was not
good for him or his work, and begging her to make
his excuses to Mr. Vincent.

A week or two passed, and nothing whatever happened.
Then he heard again from Lady Laura, and again he
answered by a polite refusal, adding a little more
as to his own state of mind; and again silence fell.

Then at last Mr. Vincent called on him in person one
evening after dinner.

* * * *
*

Laurie’s rooms were in Mitre Court, very convenient
to the Temple—­two rooms opening into one
another, and communicating with the staircase.

He had played a little on his grand piano, that occupied
a third of his sitting-room, and had then dropped
off to sleep before his fire. He awakened suddenly
to see the big man standing almost over him, and sat
up confusedly.

Laurie hastened to welcome him, to set him down in
a deep chair, to offer whisky and to supply tobacco.
There was something about this man that commanded
deference.

“You know why I have come, I expect,”
said the medium, smiling.

Laurie smiled back, a little nervously.

“I have come to see whether you will not reconsider
your decision.”

The boy shook his head.

“I think not,” he said.

“You found no ill effects, I hope, from what
happened at Lady Laura’s?”

“Not at all, after the first shock.”

“Doesn’t that reassure you at all, Mr.
Baxter?”

Laurie hesitated.

“It’s like this,” he said; “I’m
not really convinced. I don’t see anything
final in what happened.”

“Will you explain, please?”

Laurie set the results of his meditations forth at
length. There was nothing, he said, that could
not be accounted for by a very abnormal state of subjectivity.
The fact that this ... this young person’s name
was in his mind ... and so forth....

“... And I find it rather distracting to
my work,” he ended. “Please don’t
think me rude or ungrateful, Mr. Vincent.”

He thought he was being very strong and sensible.

The medium was silent for a moment.

“Doesn’t it strike you as odd that I myself
was able to get no results that night?” he said
presently.

Page 50

“How? I don’t understand.”

“Why, as a rule, I find no difficulty at all
in getting some sort of response by automatic handwriting.
Are you aware that I could do nothing at all that
night?”

Laurie considered it.

“Well,” he said at last, “this may
sound very foolish to you; but granting that I have
got unusual gifts that way—­they are your
own words, Mr. Vincent—­if that is so, I
don’t see why my own concentration of thought,
or hypnotic sleep or trance or whatever it was—­might
not have been so intense as to—­”

“I quite see,” interrupted the other.
“That is, of course, conceivable from your point
of view. It had occurred to me that you might
think that.... Then I take it that your theory
is that the subconscious self is sufficient to account
for it all—­that in this hypnotic sleep,
if you care to call it so, you simply uttered what
was in your heart, and identified yourself with ...
with your memory of that young girl.”

“I suppose so,” said Laurie shortly.

“And the rapping, loud, continuous, unmistakable?”

“That doesn’t seem to me important.
I did not actually hear it, you know.”

“Then what you need is some unmistakable sign?”

“Yes ... but I see perfectly that this is impossible.
Whatever I said in my sleep, either I can’t
identify it as true, in which case it is worthless
as evidence, or I can identify it, because I already
know it, and in that case it is worthless again.”

The medium smiled, half closing his eyes.

“You must think us very childish, Mr. Baxter,”
he said.

He sat up a little in his chair; then, putting his
hand into his breast pocket, drew out a note-book,
holding it still closed on his knee.

“May I ask you a rather painful question?”
he said gently.

Laurie nodded. He felt so secure.

“Would you kindly tell me—­first,
whether you have seen the grave of this young girl
since you left the country; secondly, whether anyone
happens to have mentioned it to you?”

Laurie swallowed in his throat.

“Certainly no one has mentioned it to me.
And I have not seen it since I left the country.”

“How long ago was that?”

“That was ... about September the twenty-seventh.”

“Thank you...!” He opened the note-book
and turned the pages a moment or two. “And
will you listen to this, Mr. Baxter?—­’Tell
Laurie that the ground has sunk a little above my
grave; and that cracks are showing at the sides.’”

“What is that book?” said the boy hoarsely.

The medium closed it and returned it to his pocket.

“That book, Mr. Baxter, contains a few extracts
from some of the things you said during your trance.
The sentence I have read is one of them, an answer
given to a demand made by me that the control should
give some unmistakable proof of her identity.
She ... you hesitated some time before giving that
answer.”

Page 51

“Who took the notes?”

“Mrs. Stapleton. You can see the originals
if you wish. I thought it might distress you
to know that such notes had been taken; but I have
had to risk that. We must not lose you, Mr. Baxter.”

Laurie sat, dumb and bewildered.

“Now all you have to do,” continued the
medium serenely, “is to find out whether what
has been said is correct or not. If it is not
correct, there will be an end of the matter, if you
choose. But if it is correct—­”

“Stop; let me think!” cried Laurie.

He was back again in the confusion from which he thought
he had escaped. Here was a definite test, offered
at least in good faith—­just such a test
as had been lacking before; and he had no doubt whatever
that it would be borne out by facts. And if it
were—­was there any conceivable hypothesis
that would explain it except the one offered so confidently
by this grave, dignified man who sat and looked at
him with something of interested compassion in his
heavy eyes? Coincidence? It was absurd.
Certainly graves did sink, sometimes—­but
... Thought-transference from someone who noticed
the grave...? But why that particular thought,
so vivid, concise, and pointed...?

If it were true...?

He looked hopelessly at the man, who sat smoking quietly
and waiting.

And then again another thought, previously ignored,
pierced him like a sword. If it were true; if
Amy herself, poor pretty Amy, had indeed been there,
were indeed near him now, hammering and crying out
like a child shut out at night, against his own skeptical
heart ... if it were indeed true that during those
two hours she had had her heart’s desire, and
had been one with his very soul, in a manner to which
no earthly union could aspire ... how had he treated
her? Even at this thought a shudder of repulsion
ran through him.... It was unnatural, detestable
... yet how sweet...! What did the Church say
of such things...? But what if religion were
wrong, and this indeed were the satiety of the higher
nature of which marriage was but the material expression...?

The thoughts flew swifter than clouds as he sat there,
bewildering, torturing, beckoning. He made a
violent effort. He must be sane, and face things.

“Mr. Vincent,” he cried.

The kindly face turned to him again.

“Mr. Vincent....”

“Hush, I quite understand,” said the fatherly
voice. “It is a shock, I know; but Truth
is a little shocking sometimes. Wait. I perfectly
understand that you must have time. You must think
it all over, and verify this. You must not commit
yourself. But I think you had better have my
address. The ladies are a little too emotional,
are they not? I expect you would sooner come
to see me without them.”

He laid his card on the little tea-table and stood
up.

“Good-night, Mr. Baxter.”

Laurie took his hand, and looked for a moment into
the kind eyes. Then the man was gone.

Page 52

II

That was a little while ago, now, and Laurie sitting
over breakfast had had time to think it out, and by
an act of sustained will to suspend his judgment.

He had come back again to the state I have described—­to
nervous interest—­no more than that.
The terror seemed gone, and certainly the skepticism
seemed gone too. Now he had to face Maggie and
his mother, and to see the grave....

Somehow he had become more accustomed to the idea
that there might be real and solid truth under it
all, and familiarity had bred ease. Yet there
was nervousness there too at the thought of going home.
There were moods in which, sitting or walking alone,
he passionately desired it all to be true; other moods
in which he was acquiescent; but in both there was
a faint discomfort in the thought of meeting Maggie,
and a certain instinct of propitiation towards her.
Maggie had begun to stand for him as a kind of embodiment
of a view of life which was sane, wholesome, and curiously
attractive; there was a largeness about her, a strength,
a sense of fresh air that was delightful. It was
that kind of thing, he thought, that had attracted
him to her during this past summer. The image
of Amy, on the other hand, more than ever now since
those recent associations, stood for something quite
contrary—­certainly for attractiveness, but
of a feverish and vivid kind, extraordinarily unlike
the other. To express it in terms of time, he
thought of Maggie in the morning, and of Amy in the
evening, particularly after dinner. Maggie was
cool and sunny; Amy suited better the evening fever
and artificial light.

And now Maggie had to be faced.

First he reflected that he had not breathed a hint,
either to her or his mother, as to what had passed.
They both would believe that he had dropped all this.
There would then be no arguing, that at least was a
comfort. But there was a curious sense of isolation
and division between him and the girl.

Yet, after all, he asked himself indignantly, what
affair was it of hers? She was not his confessor;
she was just a convent-bred girl who couldn’t
understand. He would be aloof and polite.
That was the attitude. And he would manage his
own affairs.

He drew a few brisk draughts of smoke from his pipe
and stood up. That was settled.

* * * *
*

It was in this determined mood then that he stepped
out on to the platform at the close of this wintry
day, and saw Maggie, radiant in furs, waiting for
him, with her back to the orange sunset.

These two did not kiss one another. It was thought
better not. But he took her hand with a pleasant
sense of welcome and home-coming.

“Auntie’s in the brougham,” she
said. “There’s lots of room for the
luggage on the top.... Oh! Laurie, how jolly
this is!”

It was a pleasant two-mile drive that they had.
Laurie sat with his back to the horses. His mother
patted his knee once or twice under the fur rug, and
looked at him with benevolent pleasure. It seemed
at first a very delightful home-coming. Mrs.
Baxter asked after Mr. Morton, Laurie’s coach,
with proper deference.

Page 53

But places have as strong a power of retaining associations
as persons, and even as they turned down into the
hamlet Laurie was aware that this was particularly
true just now. He carefully did not glance out
at Mr. Nugent’s shop, but it was of no use.
The whole place was as full to him of the memory of
Amy—­and more than the memory, it seemed—­as
if she was still alive. They drew up at the very
gate where he had whispered her name; the end of the
yew walk, where he had sat on a certain night, showed
beyond the house; and half a mile behind lay the meadows,
darkling now, where he had first met her face to face
in the sunset, and the sluice of the stream where they
had stood together silent. And all was like a
landscape seen through colored paper by a child, it
was of the uniform tint of death and sorrow.

Laurie was rather quiet all that evening. His
mother noticed it, and it produced a remark from her
that for an instant brought his heart into his mouth.

“You look a little peaked, dearest,” she
said, as she took her bedroom candlestick from him.
“You haven’t been thinking any more about
that Spiritualism?”

He handed a candlestick to Maggie, avoiding her eyes.

“Oh, for a bit,” he said lightly, “but
I haven’t touched the thing for over two months.”

He said it so well that even Maggie was reassured.
She had just hesitated for a fraction of a second
to hear his answer, and she went to bed well content.

Her contentment was even deeper next morning when
Laurie, calling to her through the cheerful frosty
air, made her stop at the turning to the village on
her way to church.

“I’m coming,” he said virtuously;
“I haven’t been on a weekday for ages.”

They talked of this and that for the half-mile before
them. At the church door she hesitated again.

“Laurie, I wish you’d come to the Protestant
churchyard with me for a moment afterwards, will you?”

He paled so suddenly that she was startled.

“Why?” he said shortly.

“I want you to see something.”

He looked at her still for an instant with an incomprehensible
expression. Then he nodded with set lips.

When she came out he was waiting for her. She
determined to say something of regret.

“Laurie, I’m dreadfully sorry if I shouldn’t
have said that.... I was stupid.... But
perhaps—­”

“What is it you want me to see?” he said
without the faintest expression in his voice.

“Just some flowers,” she said. “You
don’t mind, do you?”

She saw him trembling a little.

“Was that all?”

“Why yes.... What else could it be?”

They went on a few steps without another word.
At the church gate he spoke again.

“Only ... only I have heard of mounds sinking
sometimes, or cracking at the sides. But this
one—­”

“Oh yes,” interrupted the girl. “But
this was very bad yesterday.... What’s
the matter, Laurie?”

He had turned his face with some suddenness, and there
was in it a look of such terror that she herself was
frightened.

“What were you saying, Maggie?”

“It was nothing of any importance,” said
the girl hurriedly. “It wasn’t in
the least disfigured, if that—­”

“Maggie, will you please tell me exactly in
what condition this grave was yesterday? When
was it put right?”

“I ... I noticed it when I brought the
chrysanthemums up yesterday morning. The ground
was sunk a little, and cracks were showing at the
sides. I told the sexton to put it right.
He seems to have done it.... Laurie, why do you
look like that?”

He was staring at her with an expression that might
have meant anything. She would not have been
surprised if he had burst into a fit of laughter.
It was horrible and unnatural.

“Laurie! Laurie! Don’t look
like that!”

He turned suddenly away and left her. She hurried
after him.

On the way to the house he told her the whole story
from beginning to end.

III

The two were sitting together in the little smoking-room
at the back of the house on the last night of Laurie’s
holidays. He was to go back to town next morning.

Maggie had passed a thoroughly miserable week.
She had had to keep her promise not to tell Mrs. Baxter—­not
that that lady would have been of much service, but
the very telling would be a relief—­and things
really were not serious enough to justify her telling
Father Mahon.

To her the misery lay, not in any belief she had that
the spiritualistic claim was true, but that the boy
could be so horribly excited by it. She had gone
over the arguments again and again with him, approving
heartily of his suggestions as to the earlier part
of the story, and suggesting herself what seemed to
her the most sensible explanation of the final detail.
Graves did sink, she said, in two cases out of three,
and Laurie was as aware of that as herself. Why
in the world should not this then be attributed to
the same subconscious mind as that which, in the hypnotic
sleep—­or whatever it was—­had
given voice to the rest of his imaginations? Laurie
had shaken his head. Now they were at it once
more. Mrs. Baxter had gone to bed half an hour
before.

Page 55

“It’s too wickedly grotesque,” she
said indignantly. “You can’t seriously
believe that poor Amy’s soul entered into your
mind for an hour and a half in Lady Laura’s
drawing-room. Why, what’s purgatory, then,
or heaven? It’s so utterly and ridiculously
impossible that I can’t speak of it with patience.”

Laurie smiled at her rather wearily and contemptuously.

“The point,” he said, “is this:
Which is the simplest hypothesis? You and I both
believe that the soul is somewhere; and it’s
natural, isn’t it, that she should want—­oh!
dash it all! Maggie, I think you should remember
that she was in love with me—­as well as
I with her,” he added.

Maggie made a tiny mental note.

“I don’t deny for an instant that it’s
a very odd story,” she said. “But
this kind of explanation is just—­oh, I can’t
speak of it. You allowed yourself that up to
this last thing you didn’t really believe it;
and now because of this coincidence the whole thing’s
turned upside down. Laurie, I wish you’d
be reasonable.”

Laurie glanced at her.

She was sitting with her back to the curtained and
shuttered window, beyond which lay the yew-walk; and
the lamplight from the tall stand fell full upon her.
She was dressed in some rich darkish material, her
breast veiled in filmy white stuff, and her round,
strong arms lay, bare to the elbow, along the arms
of her chair. She was a very pleasant wholesome
sight. But her face was troubled, and her great
serene eyes were not so serene as usual. He was
astonished at the persistence with which she attacked
him. Her whole personality seemed thrown into
her eyes and gestures and quick words.

“Maggie,” he said, “please listen.
I’ve told you again and again that I’m
not actually convinced. What you say is just conceivably
possible. But it doesn’t seem to me to
be the most natural explanation. The most natural
seems to me to be what I have said; and you’re
quite right in saying that it’s this last thing
that has made the difference. It’s exactly
like the grain that turns the whole bottle into solid
salt. It needed that.... But, as I’ve
said, I can’t be actually and finally convinced
until I’ve seen more. I’m going to
see more. I wrote to Mr. Vincent this morning.”

“You did?” cried the girl.

“Don’t be silly, please.... Yes,
I did. I told him I’d be at his service
when I came back to London. Not to have done that
would have been cowardly and absurd. I owe him
that.”

“Laurie, I wish you wouldn’t,” said
the girl pleadingly.

He sat up a little, disturbed by this very unusual
air of hers.

“But if it’s all such nonsense,”
he said, “what’s there to be afraid of?”

Page 56

“You seem to think I’ve got no heart,”
he cried. “Suppose it was true—­suppose
really and truly Amy was here, and—­”

A sudden clear sharp sound like the crack of a whip
sounded from the corner of the room. Even Maggie
started and glanced at the boy. He was dead white
on the instant; his lips were trembling.

“What was that?” he whispered sharp and
loud.

“Just the woodwork,” she said tranquilly;
“the thaw has set in tonight.”

Laurie looked at her; his lips still moved nervously.

“But—­but—­” he began.

“Dear boy, don’t you see the state of
nerves—­”

Again came the little sharp crack, and she stopped.
For an instant she was disturbed; certain possibilities
opened before her, and she regarded them. Then
she crushed them down, impatiently and half timorously.
She stood up abruptly.

“I’m going to bed,” she said.
“This is too ridiculous—­”

“No, no; don’t leave me ... Maggie
... I don’t like it.”

She sat down again, wondering at his childishness,
and yet conscious that her own nerves, too, were ever
so slightly on edge. She would not look at him,
for fear that the meeting of eyes might hint at more
than she meant. She threw her head back on her
chair and remained looking at the ceiling. But
to think that the souls of the dead—­ah,
how repulsive!

Outside the night was very still.

The hard frost had kept the world iron-bound in a
sprinkle of snow during the last two or three days,
but this afternoon the thaw had begun. Twice
during dinner there had come the thud of masses of
snow falling from the roof on to the lawn outside,
and the clear sparkle of the candles had seemed a
little dim and hazy. “It would be a comfort
to get at the garden again,” she had reflected.

And now that the two sat here in the windless silence
the thaw became more apparent every instant.
The silence was profound, and the little noises of
the night outside, the drip from the eaves slow and
deliberate, the rustle of released leaves, and even
the gentle thud on the lawn from the yew branches—­all
these helped to emphasize the stillness. It was
not like the murmur of day; it was rather like the
gnawing of a mouse in the wainscot of some death chamber.

It requires almost superhumanly strong nerves to sit
at night, after a conversation of this kind, opposite
an apparently reasonable person who is white and twitching
with terror, even though one resolutely refrains from
looking at him, without being slightly affected.
One may argue with oneself to any extent, tap one’s
foot cheerfully on the floor, fill the mind most painstakingly
with normal thoughts; yet it is something of a conflict,
however victorious one may be.

Even Maggie herself became aware of this.

It was not that now for one single moment she allowed
that the two little sudden noises in the room could
possibly proceed from any cause whatever except that
which she had stated—­the relaxation of stiffened
wood under the influence of the thaw. Nor had
all Laurie’s arguments prevailed to shake in
the smallest degree her resolute conviction that there
was nothing whatever preternatural in his certainly
queer story.

Page 57

Yet, as she sat there in the lamplight, with Laurie
speechless before her, and the great curtained window
behind, she became conscious of an uneasiness that
she could not entirely repel. It was just physical,
she said; it was the result of the change of weather;
or, at the most, it was the silence that had now fallen
and the proximity of a terrified boy.

She looked across at him again.

He was lying back in the old green arm-chair, his
eyes rather shadowed from the lamp overhead, quite
still and quiet, his hands still clasping the lion
bosses of his chair-arms. Beside him, on the little
table, lay his still smoldering cigarette-end in the
silver tray....

Maggie suddenly sprang to her feet, slipped round
the table, and caught him by the arm.

“Laurie, Laurie, wake up.... What’s
the matter?”

A long shudder passed through him. He sat up,
with a bewildered look.

“Eh? What is it?” he said. “Was
I asleep?”

He rubbed his hands over his eyes and looked round.

“What is it, Maggie? Was I asleep?”

Was the boy acting? Surely it was good acting!
Maggie threw herself down on her knees by the chair.

“Laurie! Laurie! I beg you not to
go to see Mr. Vincent. It’s bad for you....
I do wish you wouldn’t.”

He still blinked at her a moment.

“I don’t understand. What do you
mean, Maggie?”

She stood up, ashamed of her impulsiveness.

“Only I wish you wouldn’t go and see that
man. Laurie, please don’t.”

He stood up too, stretching. Every sign of nervousness
seemed gone.

“Not see Mr. Vincent? Nonsense; of course
I shall. You don’t understand, Maggie.”

Chapter VII

I

“What a relief,” sighed Mrs. Stapleton.
“I thought we had lost him.”

The three were sitting once again in Lady Laura’s
drawing-room soon after lunch. Mr. Vincent had
just looked in with Laurie’s note to give the
news. It was a heavy fog outside, woolly in texture
and orange in color, and the tall windows seemed opaque
in the lamplight; the room, by contrast, appeared
a safe and pleasant refuge from the reek and stinging
vapor of the street.

Mrs. Stapleton had been lunching with her friend.
The Colonel had returned for Christmas, so his wife’s
duties had recalled her for the present from those
spiritual conversations which she had enjoyed in the
autumn. It was such a refreshment, she had said
with a patient smile, to slip away sometimes into
the purer atmosphere.

Mr. Vincent folded the letter and restored it to his
pocket.

“We must be careful with him,” he said.
“He is extraordinarily sensitive. I almost
wish he were not so developed. Temperaments like
his are apt to be thrown off their balance.”

Lady Laura was silent.

Page 58

For herself she was not perfectly happy. She
had lately come across one or two rather deplorable
cases. A very promising girl, daughter of a publican
in the suburbs, had developed the same kind of powers,
and the end of it all had been rather a dreadful scene
in Baker Street. She was now in an asylum.
A friend of her own, too, had lately taken to lecturing
against Christianity in rather painful terms.
Lady Laura wondered why people could not be as well
balanced as herself.

“I think he had better not come to the public
seances at present,” went on the medium.
“That, no doubt, will come later; but I was going
to ask a great favor from you, Lady Laura.”

She looked up.

“That bother about the rooms is not yet settled,
and the Sunday seances will have to cease for
the present. I wonder if you would let us come
here, just a few of us only, for three or four Sundays,
at any rate.”

She brightened up.

“Why, it would be the greatest pleasure,”
she said. “But what about the cabinet?”

“If necessary, I would send one across.
Will you allow me to make arrangements?”

Mrs. Stapleton beamed.

“What a privilege!” she said. “Dearest,
I quite envy you. I am afraid dear Tom would
never consent—­”

“There are just one or two things on my mind,”
went on Mr. Vincent so pleasantly that the interruption
seemed almost a compliment, “and the first is
this. I want him to see for himself. Of course,
for ourselves, his trance is the point; but hardly
for him. He is tremendously impressed; I can
see that; though he pretends not to be. But I
should like him to see something unmistakable as soon
as possible. We must prevent his going into trance,
if possible.... And the next thing is his religion.”

“Catholics are supposed not to come,”
observed Mrs. Stapleton.

“Just so.... Mr. Baxter is a convert, isn’t
he...? I thought so.”

He mused for a moment or two.

The ladies had never seen him so interested in an
amateur. Usually his manner was remarkable for
its detachment and severe assurance; but it seemed
that this case excited even him. Lady Laura was
filled again with sudden compunction.

“Mr. Vincent,” she said, “do you
really think there is no danger for this boy?”

He glanced up at her.

“There is always danger,” he said.
“We know that well enough. We can but take
precautions. But pioneers always have to risk
something.”

She was not reassured.

“But I mean special danger. He is extraordinarily
sensitive, you know. There was that girl from
Surbiton....”

“Oh! she was exceptionally hysterical.
Mr. Baxter’s not like that. I do not see
that he runs any greater risk than we run ourselves.”

“You are sure of that?”

He smiled deprecatingly.

“I am sure of nothing,” he said.
“But if you feel you would sooner not—­”

Page 59

“No, no,” she cried. “I didn’t
mean that for one moment. Please, please come
here. I only wondered whether there was any particular
precaution—­”

“I will think about it,” said the medium.
“But I am sure we must be careful not to shock
him. Of course, we don’t all take the same
view about religion; but we can leave that for the
present. The point is that Mr. Baxter should,
if possible, see something unmistakable. The
rest can take care of itself.... Then, if you
consent, Lady Laura, we might have a little sitting
here next Sunday night. Would nine o’clock
suit you?”

He glanced at the two ladies.

“That will do very well,” said the mistress
of the house. “And, about preparations—­”

“I will look in on Saturday afternoon.
Is there anyone particular you think of asking?”

“Mr. Jamieson came to see me again a few days
ago,” suggested Lady Laura tentatively.

“That will do very well. Then we three
and those two. That will be quite enough for
the present.”

“I think they will not be necessary....
Good-day.... Saturday afternoon.”

The two sat on silently for a minute or two after
he was gone.

“What is the matter, dearest?”

Lady Laura’s little anxious face did not move.
She was staring thoughtfully at the fire. Mrs.
Stapleton laid a sympathetic hand on the other’s
knee.

“Dearest—­” she began.

“No; it is nothing, darling,” said Lady
Laura.

* * * *
*

Meanwhile the medium was picking his way through the
foggy streets. Figures loomed up, sudden and
enormous, and vanished again. Smoky flares of
flame shone like spots of painted fire, bright and
unpenetrating, from windows overhead; and sounds came
to him through the woolly atmosphere, dulled and sonorous.
It would, so to speak, have been a suitably dramatic
setting for his thoughts if he had been thinking in
character, vaguely suggestive of presences and hints
and peeps into the unknown.

But he was a very practical man. His spiritualistic
faith was a reality to him, as unexciting as Christianity
to the normal Christian; he entertained no manner
of doubt as to its truth.

Beyond all the fraud, the self-deception, the amazing
feats of the subconscious self, there remained certain
facts beyond doubting—­facts which required,
he believed, an objective explanation, which none but
the spiritualistic thesis offered. He had far
more evidence, he considered sincerely enough, for
his spiritualism than most Christians for their Christianity.

Page 60

He had no very definite theory as to the spiritual
world beyond thinking that it was rather like this
world. For him it was peopled with individualities
of various characters and temperaments, of various
grades and achievements; and of these a certain number
had the power of communicating under great difficulties
with persons on this side who were capable of receiving
such communications. That there were dangers
connected with this process, he was well aware; he
had seen often enough the moral sense vanish and the
mental powers decay. But these were to him no
more than the honorable wounds to which all who struggle
are liable. The point for him was that here lay
the one certain means of getting into touch with reality.
Certainly that reality was sometimes of a disconcerting
nature, and seldom of an illuminating one; he hated,
as much as anyone, the tambourine business, except
so far as it was essential; and he deplored the fact
that, as he believed, it was often the most degraded
and the least satisfactory of the inhabitants of the
other world that most easily got into touch with the
inhabitants of this. Yet, for him, the main tenets
of spiritualism were as the bones of the universe;
it was the only religion which seemed to him in the
least worthy of serious attention.

He had not practiced as a medium for longer than ten
or a dozen years. He had discovered, by chance
as he thought, that he possessed mediumistic powers
in an unusual degree, and had begun then to take up
the life as a profession. He had suffered, so
far as he was aware, no ill effects from this life,
though he had seen others suffer; and, as his fame
grew, his income grew with it.

It is necessary, then, to understand that he was not
a conscious charlatan; he loathed mechanical tricks
such as he occasionally came across; he was perfectly
and serenely convinced that the powers which he possessed
were genuine, and that the personages he seemed to
come across in his mediumistic efforts were what they
professed to be; that they were not hallucinatory,
that they were not the products of fraud, that they
were not necessarily evil. He regarded this religion
as he regarded science; both were progressive, both
liable to error, both capable of abuse. Yet as
a scientist did not shrink from experiment for fear
of risk, neither must the spiritualist.

As he picked his way to his lodgings on the north
of the park, he was thinking about Laurie Baxter.
That this boy possessed in an unusual degree what
he would have called “occult powers” was
very evident to him. That these powers involved
a certain risk was evident too. He proposed,
therefore, to take all reasonable precautions.
All the catastrophes he had witnessed in the past
were due, he thought, to a too rapid development of
those powers, or to inexperience. He determined,
therefore, to go slowly.

Page 61

First, the boy must be convinced; next, he must be
attached to the cause; thirdly, his religion must
be knocked out of him; fourthly, he must be trained
and developed. But for the present he must not
be allowed to go into trance if it could be prevented.
It was plain, he thought, that Laurie had a very strong
“affinity,” as he would have said, with
the disembodied spirit of a certain “Amy Nugent.”
His communication with her had been of a very startling
nature in its rapidity and perfection. Real progress
might be made, then, through this channel.

* * * *
*

Yes; I am aware that this sounds grotesque nonsense.

II

Laurie came back to town in a condition of interior
quietness that rather astonished him. He had
said to Maggie that he was not convinced; and that
was true so far as he knew. Intellectually, the
spiritualistic theory was at present only the hypothesis
that seemed the most reasonable; yet morally he was
as convinced of its truth as of anything in the world.
And this showed itself by the quietness in which he
found his soul plunged.

Moral conviction—­that conviction on which
a man acts—­does not always coincide with
the intellectual process. Occasionally it outruns
it; occasionally lags behind; and the first sign of
its arrival is the cessation of strain. The intellect
may still be busy, arranging, sorting, and classifying;
but the thing itself is done, and the soul leans back.

A certain amount of excitement made itself felt when
he found Mr. Vincent’s letter waiting for his
arrival to congratulate him on his decision, and to
beg him to be at Queen’s Gate not later than
half-past eight o’clock on the following Sunday;
but it was not more than momentary. He knew the
thing to be inevitably true now; the time and place
at which it manifested itself was not supremely important.

Yes, he wrote in answer; he would certainly keep the
appointment suggested.

He dined out at a restaurant, returned to his rooms,
and sat down to arrange his ideas.

* * * *
*

These, to be frank, were not very many, nor very profound.

He had already, in the days that had passed since
his shock, no lighter because expected, when he had
learned from Maggie that the test was fulfilled, and
that a fact known to no one present, not even himself,
in Queen’s Gate, had been communicated through
his lips—­since that time the idea had become
familiar that the veil between this world and the
next was a very thin one. After all, a large
number of persons in the world believe that, as it
is; and they are not, in consequence, in a continuous
state of exaltation. Laurie had learned this,
he thought, experimentally. Very well, then, that
was so; there was no more to be said.

Page 62

Next, the excitement of the thought of communicating
with Amy in particular had to a large extent burned
itself out. It was nearly four months since her
death; and in his very heart of hearts he was beginning
to be aware that she had not been so entirely his twin-soul
as he would still have maintained. He had reflected
a little, in the meantime, upon the grocer’s
shop, the dissenting tea-parties, the odor of cheeses.
Certainly these things could not destroy an “affinity”
if the affinity were robust; but it would need to
be....

He was still very tender towards the thought of her;
she had gained too, inevitably, by dying, a dignity
she had lacked while living, and it might well be
that intercourse with her in the manner proposed would
be an extraordinarily sweet experience. But he
was no longer excited—­passionately and
overwhelmingly—­by the prospect. It
would be delightful? Yes. But....

* * * *
*

Then Laurie began to look at his religion, and at
that view he stopped dead. He had no ideas at
all on the subject; he had not a notion where he stood.
All he knew was that it had become uninteresting.
True? Oh, yes, he supposed so. He retained
it still as many retain faith in the supernatural—­a
reserve that could be drawn upon in extremities.

He had not yet missed hearing Mass on Sunday; in fact,
he proposed to go even next Sunday. “A
man must have a religion,” he said to himself;
and, intellectually, there was at present no other
possible religion for him except the Catholic.
Yet as he looked into the future he was doubtful.

He drew himself up in his chair and began to fill
his pipe.... In three days he would be seated
in a room with three or four persons, he supposed.
Of these, two—­and certainly the two strongest
characters—­had no religion except that supplied
by spiritualism, and he had read enough to know this
was, at any rate in the long run, non-Christian.
And these three or four persons, moreover, believed
with their whole hearts that they were in relations
with the invisible world, far more evident and sensible
than those claimed by any other believers on the face
of the earth. And, after all, Laurie reflected,
there seemed to be justice in their claim. He
would be seated in that room, he repeated to himself,
and it might be that before he left it he would have
seen with his own eyes, and possibly handled, living
persons who had, in the common phrase, “died”
and been buried. Almost certainly, at the very
least, he would have received from such intelligences
unmistakable messages....

He was astonished that he was not more excited.
He asked himself again whether he really believed
it; he compared his belief in it with his belief in
the existence of New Zealand. Yes, if that were
belief, he had it. But the excitement of doubt
was gone, as no doubt it was gone when New Zealand
became a geographical expression.

Page 63

He was astonished at its naturalness—­at
the extraordinary manner in which, when once the evidence
had been seen and the point of view grasped, the whole
thing fell into place. It seemed to him as if
he must have known it all his life; yet, he knew,
six months ago he had hardly known more than that
there were upon the face of the earth persons called
Spiritualists, who believed, or pretended to believe,
what he then was quite sure was fantastic nonsense.
And now he was, to all intents, one of them....

He was being drawn forward, it seemed, by a process
as inevitable as that of spring or autumn; and, once
he had yielded to it, the conflict and the excitement
were over. Certainly this made very few demands.
Christianity said that those were blessed who had not
seen and yet believed; Spiritualism said that the
only reasonable belief was that which followed seeing.

So then Laurie sat and meditated.

Once or twice that evening he looked round him tranquilly
without a touch of that terror that had seized him
in the smoking-room at home.

If all this were true—­and he repeated to
himself that he knew it was true—­these
presences were about him now, so why was it that he
was no longer frightened?

He looked carefully into the dark corner behind him,
beyond the low jutting bookshelf, in the angle between
the curtained windows, at his piano, glossy and mysterious
in the gloom, at the door half-open into his bedroom.
All was quiet here, shut off from the hum of Fleet
Street; circumstances were propitious. Why was
he not frightened...? Why, what was there to
frighten him? These presences were natural and
normal; even as a Catholic he believed in them.
And if they manifested themselves, what was there
to fear in that?

He looked steadily and serenely; and as he looked,
like the kindling of a fire, there rose within him
a sense of strange exaltation.

“Amy,” he whispered.

But there was no movement or hint.

Laurie smiled a little, wearily. He felt tired;
he would sleep a little. He beat out his pipe,
crossed his feet before the fire, and closed his eyes.

III

There followed that smooth rush into gulfs of sleep
that provides perhaps the most exquisite physical
sensation known to man, as the veils fall thicker
and softer every instant, and the consciousness gathers
itself inwards from hands and feet and limbs, like
a dog curling himself up for rest; yet retains itself
in continuous being, and is able to regard its own
comfort. All this he remembered perfectly half
an hour later; but there followed in his memory that
inevitable gap in which self loses itself before emerging
into the phantom land of dreams, or returning to reality.

But that into which he emerged, he remembered afterwards,
was a different realm altogether from that which is
usual—­from that country of grotesque fancy
and jumbled thoughts, of thin shadows of truth and
echoes from the common world where most of us find
ourselves in sleep.

Page 64

His dream was as follows:—­

He was still in his room, he thought, but no longer
in his chair. Instead, he stood in the very center
of the floor, or at least poised somewhere above it,
for he could see at a glance, without turning, all
that the room contained. He directed his attention—­for
it was this, rather than sight, through which he perceived—­to
the piano, the chiffonier, the chairs, the two doors,
the curtained windows; and finally, with scarcely
even a touch of surprise, to himself still sunk in
the chair before the fire. He regarded himself
with pleased interest, remembering even in that instant
that he had never before seen himself with closed
eyes....

All in the room was extraordinarily vivid and clear-cut.
It was true that the firelight still wavered and sank
again in billows of soft color about the shadowed
walls, but the changing light was no more an interruption
to the action of that steady medium through which he
perceived than the movement of summer clouds across
the full sunlight. It was at that moment that
he understood that he saw no longer with eyes, but
with that faculty of perception to which sight is only
analogous—­that faculty which underlies and
is common to all the senses alike.

His reasoning powers, too, at this moment, seemed
to have gone from him like a husk. He did not
argue or deduce; simply he understood. And, in
a flash, simultaneous with the whole vision, he perceived
that he was behind all the slow processes of the world,
by which this is added to that, and a conclusion drawn;
by which light travels, and sounds resolve themselves
and emotions run their course. He had reached,
he thought, the ultimate secret.... It was This
that lay behind everything.

Now it is impossible to set down, except progressively,
all this sum of experiences that occupied for him
one interminable instant. Neither did he remember
afterwards the order in which they presented themselves;
for it seemed to him that there was no order; all was
simultaneous.

But he understood plainly by intuition that all was
open to him. Space no longer existed for him;
nothing, to his perception, separated this from that.
He was able, he saw, without stirring from his attitude
to see in an instant any place or person towards which
he chose to exercise his attention. It seemed
a marvelously simple point, this—­that space
was little more than an illusion; that it was, after
all, nothing else but a translation into rather coarse
terms of what may be called “differences.”
“Here” and “There” were but
relative terms; certainly they corresponded to facts,
but they were not those facts themselves....
And since he now stood behind them he saw them on
their inner side, as a man standing in the interior
of a globe may be said to be equally present to every
point upon its surface.

Page 65

The fascination of the thought was enormous; and,
like a child who begins to take notice and to learn
the laws of extension and distance, so he began to
learn their reverse. He saw, he thought (as he
had seen once before, only, this time, without the
sense of movement), the interior of the lighted drawing
room at home, and his mother nodding in her chair;
he directed his attention to Maggie, and perceived
her passing across the landing toward the head of
the stairs with a candle in her hand. It was
this sight that brought him to a further discovery,
to the effect that time also was of very nearly no
importance either; for he perceived that by bending
his attention upon her he could restrain her, so to
speak, in her movement. There she stood, one
foot outstretched, the candle flame leaning motionless
backward; and he knew too that it was not she who was
thus restrained, but that it was the intensity and
directness of his thought that fixed, so to say, in
terms of eternity, that instant of time....

So it went on; or, rather, so it was with him.
He pleased himself by contemplating the London streets
outside, the darkness of the garden in some square,
the interior of the Oratory where a few figures kneeled—­all
seen beyond the movements of light and shadow in this
clear invisible radiance that was to his perception
as common light to common eyes. The world of
which he had had experience—­for he found
himself unable to see that which he had never experienced—­lay
before his will like a movable map: this or that
person or place had but to be desired, and it was
present.

And then came the return; and the Horror....

He began in this way.

He understood that he wished to awake, or, rather,
to be reunited with the body that lay there in deep
sleep before the fire. He observed it for a moment
or two, interested and pleased, the face sunk a little
on the hand, the feet lightly crossed on the fender.
He looked at his own profile, the straight nose, the
parted lips through which the breath came evenly.
He attempted even to touch the face, wondering with
gentle pleasure what would be the result....

Then, suddenly, an impulse came to him to enter the
body, and with the impulse the process, it seemed,
began.

That process was not unlike that of falling asleep.
In an instant perception was gone; the lighted room
was gone, and that obedient world which he had contemplated
just now. Yet self-consciousness for a while
remained; he still had the power of perceiving his
own personality, though this dwindled every moment
down to that same gulf of nothingness through which
he had found his way.

But at the very instant in which consciousness was
passing there met him an emotion so fierce and overwhelming
that he recoiled in terror back from the body once
more and earth-perceptions; and a panic seized him.

It was such a panic as seizes a child who, fearfully
courageous, has stolen at night from his room, and
turning in half-simulated terror finds the door fast
against him, or is aware of a malignant presence come
suddenly into being, standing between himself and the
safety of his own bed.

Page 66

On the one side his fear drove him onwards; on the
other a Horror faced him. He dared not recoil,
for he understood where security lay; he longed, like
the child screaming in the dark and beating his hands,
to get back to the warmth and safety of bed; yet there
stood before him a Presence, or at the least an Emotion
of some kind, so hostile, so terrible, that he dared
not penetrate it. It was not that an actual restraint
lay upon him: he knew, that is, that the door
was open; yet it needed an effort of the will of which
his paralysis of terror rendered him incapable....

The tension became intolerable.

“O God ... God ... God....”
he cried.

And in an instant the threshold was vacated; the swift
rush asserted itself, and the space was passed.

* * * *
*

Laurie sat up abruptly in his chair.

IV

Mr. Vincent was beginning to think about going to
bed. He had come in an hour before, had written
half a dozen letters, and was smoking peacefully before
the fire.

His rooms were not remarkable in any way, except for
half a dozen objects standing on the second shelf
of his bookcase, and the selection of literature ranged
below them. For the rest, all was commonplace
enough; a mahogany knee-hold table, a couple of easy
chairs, much worn, and a long, extremely comfortable
sofa standing by itself against the wall with evident
signs, in its tumbled cushions and rubbed fabric,
of continual and frequent use. A second door gave
entrance to his bedroom.

He beat out his pipe slowly, yawned, and stood up.

It was at this instant that he heard the sudden tinkle
of the electric bell in the lobby outside, and, wondering
at the interruption at this hour, went quickly out
and opened the door on to the stairs.

“Mr. Baxter! Come in, come in; I’m
delighted to see you.”

Laurie came in without a word, went straight up to
the fire-place, and faced about.

“I’m not going to apologize,” he
said, “for coming at this time. You told
me to come and see you at any time, and I’ve
taken you at your word.”

The young man had an odd embarrassed manner, thought
the other; an air of having come in spite of uneasiness;
he was almost shamefaced.

The medium impelled him gently into a chair.

“First a cigarette,” he said; “next
a little whisky, and then I shall be delighted to
listen.... No; please do as I say.”

Laurie permitted himself to be managed; there was
a strong, almost paternal air in the other’s
manner that was difficult to resist. He lit his
cigarette, he sipped his whisky; but his movements
were nervously quick.

“Well, then....” and he interrupted himself.
“What are those things, Mr. Vincent?”
He nodded towards the second shelf in the bookcase.

Mr. Vincent turned on the hearthrug.

Page 67

“Those? Oh! those are a few rather elementary
instruments for my work.”

He lifted down a crystal ball on a small black polished
wooden stand and handed it over.

“You have heard of crystal-gazing? Well,
that is the article.”

“Is that crystal?”

“Oh no: common glass. Price three
shillings and sixpence.”

Laurie turned it over, letting the shining globe run
on to his hand.

“And this is—­” he began.

“And this,” said the medium, setting a
curious windmill-shaped affair, its sails lined with
looking-glass, on the little table by the fire, “this
is a French toy. Very elementary.”

“What’s that?”

“Look.”

Mr. Vincent wound a small handle at the back of the
windmill to a sound of clockwork, set it down again,
and released it. Instantly the sails began to
revolve, noiseless and swift, producing the effect
of a rapidly flashing circle of light across which
span lines, waxing and waning with extraordinary speed.

“What the—­”

“It’s a little machine for inducing sleep.
Oh! I haven’t used that for months.
But it’s useful sometimes. The hypnotic
subject just stares at that steadily.... Why,
you’re looking dazed yourself, already, Mr.
Baxter,” smiled the medium.

He stopped the mechanism and pushed it on one side.

“And what’s the other?” asked Laurie,
looking again at the shelf.

“Ah!”

The medium, with quite a different air, took down
and set before him an object resembling a tiny heart-shaped
table on three wheeled legs, perhaps four or five
inches across. Through the center ran a pencil
perpendicularly of which the point just touched the
tablecloth on which the thing rested. Laurie
looked at it, and glanced up.

“Yes, that’s Planchette,” said the
medium.

“For ... for automatic writing?”

The other nodded.

“Yes,” he said. “The experimenter
puts his fingers lightly upon that, and there’s
a sheet of paper beneath. That is all.”

Laurie looked at him, half curiously. Then with
a sudden movement he stood up.

“Yes,” he said. “Thank you.
But—­”

“Please sit down, Mr. Baxter.... I know
you haven’t come about that kind of thing.
Will you kindly tell me what you have come about?”

He, too, sat down, and, without looking at the other,
began slowly to fill his pipe again, with his strong
capable fingers. Laurie stared at the process,
unseeing.

“Just tell me simply,” said the medium
again, still without looking at him.

Laurie threw himself back.

“Well, I will,” he said. “I
know it’s absurdly childish; but I’m a
little frightened. It’s about a dream.”

“That’s not necessarily childish.”

“It’s a dream I had tonight—­in
my chair after dinner.”

“Well?”

* * * *
*

Then Laurie began.

Page 68

For about ten minutes he talked without ceasing.
Mr. Vincent smoked tranquilly, putting what seemed
to Laurie quite unimportant questions now and again,
and nodding gently from time to time.

“And I’m frightened,” ended Laurie;
“and I want you to tell me what it all means.”

The other drew a long inhalation through his pipe,
expelled it, and leaned back.

“Oh, it’s comparatively common,”
he said; “common, that is, with people of your
temperament, Mr. Baxter—­and mine....
You tell me that it was prayer that enabled you to
get through at the end? That is interesting.”

“But—­but—­was it more than
fancy—­more, I mean, than an ordinary dream?”

“Oh, yes; it was objective. It was a real
experience.”

“You mean—­”

“Mr. Baxter, just listen to me for a minute
or two. You can ask any questions you like at
the end. First, you are a Catholic, you told me;
you believe, that is to say, among other things, that
the spiritual world is a real thing, always present
more or less. Well, of course, I agree with you;
though I do not agree with you altogether as to the
geography and—­and other details of that
world. But you believe, I take it, that this
world is continually with us—­that this room,
so to speak, is a great deal more than that of which
our senses tell us that there are with us, now and
always, a multitude of influences, good, bad, and
indifferent, really present to our spirits?”

“I suppose so,” said Laurie.

“Now begin again. There are two kinds of
dreams. I am just stating my own belief, Mr.
Baxter. You can make what comments you like afterwards.
The one kind of dream is entirely unimportant; it is
merely a hash, a rechauffee, of our own thoughts,
in which little things that we have experienced reappear
in a hopeless sort of confusion. It is the kind
of dream that we forget altogether, generally, five
minutes after waking, if not before. But there
is another kind of dream that we do not forget.
It leaves as vivid an impression upon us as if it
were a waking experience—­an actual incident.
And that is exactly what it is.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Have you ever heard of the subliminal consciousness,
Mr. Baxter?”

“No.”

The medium smiled.

“That is fortunate,” he said. “It’s
being run to death just now.... Well, I’ll
put it in an untechnical way. There is a part
of us, is there not, that lies below our ordinary
waking thoughts—­that part of us in which
our dreams reside, our habits take shape, our instincts,
intuitions, and all the rest, are generated. Well,
in ordinary dreams, when we are asleep, it is this
part that is active. The pot boils, so to speak,
all by itself, uncontrolled by reason. A madman
is a man in whom this part is supreme in his waking
life as well. Well, it is through this part of
us that we communicate with the spiritual world.
There are, let us say, two doors in it—­that
which leads up to our senses, through which come down
our waking experiences to be stored up; and—­and
the other door....”

Page 69

“Yes?”

The medium hesitated.

“Well,” he said, “in some natures—­yours,
for instance, Mr. Baxter—­this door opens
rather easily. It was through that door that
you went, I think, in what you call your ‘dream.’
You yourself said it was quite unlike ordinary dreams.”

“Yes.”

“And I am the more sure that this is so, since
your experience is exactly that of so many others
under the same circumstances.”

Laurie moved uncomfortably in his chair.

“I don’t quite understand,” he said
sharply. “You mean it was not a dream?”

“Certainly not. At least, not a dream in
the ordinary sense. It was an actual experience.”

“But—­but I was asleep.”

“Certainly. That is one of the usual conditions—­an
almost indispensable condition, in fact. The
objective self—­I mean the ordinary workaday
faculties—­was lulled; and your subjective
self—­call it what you like—­but
it is your real self, the essential self that survives
death—­this self, simply went through the
inner door, and—­and saw what was to be
seen.”

Laurie looked at him intently. But there was
a touch of apprehension in his face, too.

“You mean,” he said slowly, “that—­that
all I saw—­the limitations of space, and
so forth—­that these were facts and not fancies?”

“Certainly. Doesn’t your theology
hint at something of the kind?”

Laurie was silent. He had no idea of what his
theology told him on the point.

“But why should I—­I of all people—­have
such an experience?” he asked suddenly.

The medium smiled.

“Who can tell that?” he said. “Why
should one man be an artist, and another not?
It is a matter of temperament. You see you’ve
begun to develop that temperament at last; and it’s
a very marked one to begin with. As for—­”

Laurie interrupted him.

“Yes, yes,” he said. “But there’s
another point. What about that fear I had when
I tried to—­to awaken?”

There passed over the medium’s face a shade
of gravity. It was no more than a shade, but
it was there. He reached out rather quickly for
his pipe which he had laid aside, and blew through
it carefully before answering.

“That?” he said, with what seemed to the
boy an affected carelessness. “That?
Oh, that’s a common experience. Don’t
think about that too much, Mr. Baxter. It’s
never very healthy—­”

“I am sorry,” said Laurie deliberately.
“But I must ask you to tell me what you think.
I must know what I’m doing.”

The medium filled his pipe again. Twice he began
to speak, and checked himself; and in the long silence
Laurie felt his fears gather upon him tenfold.

“Please tell me at once, Mr. Vincent,”
he said. “Unless I know everything that
is to be known, I will not go another step along this
road. I really mean that.”

The medium paused in his pipe-filling.

Page 70

“And what if I do tell you?” he said in
his slow virile voice. “Are you sure you
will not be turned back?”

“If it is a well-known danger, and can be avoided
with prudence, I certainly shall not turn back.”

“Very well, Mr. Baxter, I will take you at your
word.... Have you ever heard the phrase, ’The
Watcher on the Threshold’?”

Laurie shook his head.

“No,” he said. “At least I
don’t think so.”

“Well,” said the medium quietly, “that
is what we call the Fear you spoke of.... No;
don’t interrupt. I’ll tell you all
we know. It’s not very much.”

He paused again, stretched his hand for the matches,
and took one out. Laurie watched him as if fascinated
by the action.

Outside roared Oxford Street in one long rolling sound
as of the sea; but within here was that quiet retired
silence which the boy had noticed before in the same
company. Was that fancy, too, he wondered...?

The medium lit his pipe and leaned back.

“I’ll tell you all we know,” he
said again quietly. “It’s not very
much. Really the phrase I used just now sums it
up pretty well. We who have tried to get beyond
this world of sense have become aware of certain facts
of which the world generally knows nothing at all.
One of these facts is that the door between this life
and the other is guarded by a certain being of whom
we know really nothing at all, except that his presence
causes the most appalling fear in those who experience
it. He is set there—­God only knows
why—­and his main business seems to be to
restrain, if possible, from re-entering the body those
who have left it. Just occasionally his presence
is perceived by those on this side, but not often.
But I have been present at death-beds where he has
been seen—­”

“Seen?”

“Oh! yes. Seen by the dying person.
It is usually only a glimpse; it might be said to
be a mistake. For myself I believe that that
appalling terror that now and then shows itself, even
in people who do not fear death itself, who are perfectly
resigned, who have nothing on their conscience,—­well,
personally, I believe the fear comes from a sight
of this—­this Personage.”

Laurie licked his dry lips. He told himself that
he did not believe one word of it.

“And ... and he is evil?” he asked.

The other shrugged his shoulders.

“Isn’t that a relative term?” he
said. “From one point of view, certainly;
but not necessarily from all.”

“And ... and what’s the good of it?”

The medium smiled a little.

“That’s a question we soon cease to ask.
You must remember that we hardly know anything at
all yet. But one thing seems more and more certain
the more we investigate, and that is that our point
of view is not the only one, nor even the principal
one. Christianity, I fancy, says the same thing,
does it not? The ‘glory of God,’ whatever
that may be, comes before even the ‘salvation
of souls.’”

Page 71

Laurie wrenched his attention once more to a focus.

“Then I was in danger?” he said.

“Certainly. We are always in danger—­”

“You mean, if I hadn’t prayed—­”

“Ah! that is another question.... But,
in short, if you hadn’t succeeded in getting
past—­well, you’d have failed.”

Again there fell a silence.

It seemed to Laurie as if his world were falling about
him. Yet he was far from sure whether it were
not all an illusion. But the extreme quietness
and confidence of this man in enunciating these startling
theories had their effect. It was practically
impossible for the boy to sit here, still nervous
from his experience, and hear, unmoved, this apparently
reasonable and connected account of things that were
certainly incomprehensible on any other hypothesis.
His remembrance of the very startling uniqueness of
his dream was still vivid.... Surely it all fitted
in ... yet....

“But there is one thing,” broke in the
medium’s quiet voice. “Should you
ever experience this kind of thing again, I should
recommend you not to pray. Just exercise your
own individuality; assert yourself; don’t lean
on another. You are quite strong enough.”

“You mean—­”

“I mean exactly what I say. What is called
Prayer is really an imaginative concession to weakness.
Take the short cut, rather. Assert your own—­your
own individuality.”

Laurie changed his attitude. He uncrossed his
feet and sat up a little.

“Oh! pray if you want to,” said the medium.
“But you must remember, Mr. Baxter, that you
are quite an exceptional person. I assure you
that you have no conception of your own powers.
I must say that I hope you will take the strong line.”
He paused. “These seances, for instance.
Now that you know a little more of the dangers, are
you going to turn back?”

His overhung kindly eyes looked out keenly for an
instant at the boy’s restless face.

“I don’t know,” said Laurie; “I
must think....”

He got up.

“Look here, Mr. Vincent,” he said, “it
seems to me you’re extraordinarily—­er—­extraordinarily
plausible. But I’m even now not quite sure
whether I’m not going mad. It’s like
a perfectly mad dream—­all these things
one on the top of the other.”

He paused, looking sharply at the elder man, and away
again.

“Yes?”

Laurie began to finger a pencil that lay on the chimney-shelf.

“You see what I mean, don’t you?”
he said. “I’m not disputing—­er—­your
point of view, nor your sincerity. But I do wish
you would give me another proof or two.”

“You haven’t had enough?”

“Oh! I suppose I have—­if I were
reasonable. But, you know, it all seems to me
as if you suddenly demonstrated to me that twice two
made five.”

“But then, surely no proof—­”

“Yes; I know. I quite see that. Yet
I want one—­something quite absolutely ordinary.
If you can do all these things—­spirits and
all the rest—­can’t you do something
ever so much simpler, that’s beyond mistake?”

Page 72

“Oh, I daresay. But wouldn’t you
ask yet another after that?”

“I don’t know.”

“Or wouldn’t you think you’d been
hypnotized?”

Laurie shook his head.

“I’m not a fool,” he said.

“Then give me that pencil,” said the medium,
suddenly extending his hand.

Laurie stared a moment. Then he handed over the
pencil.

On the little table by the arm-chair, a couple of
feet from Laurie, stood the whisky apparatus and a
box of cigarettes. These the medium, without
moving from his chair, lifted off and set on the floor
beside him, leaving the woven-grass surface of the
table entirely bare. He then laid the pencil
gently in the center—­all without a word.
Laurie watched him carefully.

“Now kindly do not speak one word or make one
movement,” said the man peremptorily. “Wait!
You’re perfectly sure you’re not hypnotized,
or any other nonsense?”

“Certainly not.”

“Just go round the room, look out of the window,
poke the fire—­anything you like.”

“I’m satisfied,” said the boy.

“Very good. Then kindly watch that pencil.”

The medium leaned a little forward in his chair, bending
his eyes steadily upon the little wooden cylinder
lying, like any other pencil, on the top of the table.
Laurie glanced once at him, then back again.
There it lay, common and ordinary.

For at least a minute nothing happened at all, except
that from the intentness of the elder man there seemed
once more to radiate out that curious air of silence
that Laurie was beginning to know so well—­that
silence that seemed impenetrable to the common sounds
of the world and to exist altogether independent of
them. Once and again he glanced round at the
ordinary-looking room, the curtained windows, the dull
furniture; and the second time he looked back at the
pencil he was almost certain that some movement had
just taken place with it. He resolutely fixed
his eyes upon it, bending every faculty he possessed
into one tense attitude of attention. And a moment
later he could not resist a sudden movement and a
swift indrawing of breath; for there, before his very
eyes, the pencil tilted, very hesitatingly and quiveringly,
as if pulled by a spider’s thread. He heard,
too, the tiny tap of its fall.

He glanced at the medium, who jerked his head impatiently,
as if for silence. Then once more the silence
came down.

A minute later there was no longer the possibility
of a doubt.

There before the boy’s eyes, as he stared, white-faced,
with parted lips, the pencil rose, hesitated, quivered;
but, instead of falling back again, hung so for a
moment on its point, forming with itself an acute
angle with the plane of the table in an entirely impossible
position; then, once more rising higher, swung on its
point in a quarter circle, and after one more pause
and quiver, rose to its full height, remained poised
one instant, then fell with a sudden movement, rolled
across the table and dropped on the carpet.

Page 73

The medium leaned back, drawing a long breath.

“There,” he said; and smiled at the bewildered
young man.

“But—­but—­” began
the other.

“Yes, I know,” said the man. “It’s
startling, isn’t it? and indeed it’s not
as easy as it looks. I wasn’t at all sure—­”

“But, good Lord, I saw—­”

“Of course you did; but how do you know you
weren’t hypnotized?”

Laurie sat down suddenly, unconscious that he had
done so. The medium put out his hand for his
pipe once more.

“Now, I’m going to be quite honest,”
he said. “I have quite a quantity of comments
to make on that. First, it doesn’t prove
anything whatever, even if it really happened—­”

“Even if it—!”

“Certainly.... Oh, yes; I saw it too; and
there’s the pencil on the floor”—­he
stooped and picked it up.

“But what if we were both hypnotized—­both
acted upon by self-suggestion? We can’t
prove we weren’t.”

Laurie was dumb.

“Secondly, it doesn’t prove anything,
in any case, as regards the other matters we were
speaking of. It only shows—­if it really
happened, as I say—­that the mind has extraordinary
control over matter. It hasn’t anything
to do with immortality, or—­or spiritualism.”

“Then why did you do it?” gasped the boy.

“Merely fireworks ... only to show off.
People are convinced by such queer things.”

Laurie sat regarding, still with an unusual pallor
in his face and brightness in his eyes. He could
not in the last degree put into words why it was that
the tiny incident of the pencil affected him so profoundly.
Vaguely, only, he perceived that it was all connected
somehow with the ordinariness of the accessories, and
more impressive therefore than all the paraphernalia
of planchette, spinning mirrors, or even his own dreams.

He stood up again suddenly.

“It’s no good, Mr. Vincent,” he
said, putting out his hand, “I’m knocked
over. I can’t imagine why. It’s
no use talking now. I must think. Good night.”

“Good night, Mr. Baxter,” said the medium
serenely.

Chapter VIII

I

“Her ladyship told me to show you in here, sir,”
said the footman at half-past eight on Sunday evening.

Laurie put down his hat, slipped off his coat, and
went into the dining room.

The table was still littered with dessert-plates and
napkins. Two people had dined there he observed.
He went round to the fire, wondering vaguely as to
why he had not been shown upstairs, and stood, warming
his hands behind him, and looking at the pleasant gloom
of the high picture-hung walls.

In spite of himself he felt slightly more excited
than he had thought he would be; it was one thing
to be philosophical at a prospect of three days’
distance; and another when the gates of death actually
rise in sight. He wondered in what mood he would
see his own rooms again. Then he yawned slightly—­and
was a little pleased that it was natural to yawn.

Page 74

There was a rustle outside; the door opened, and Lady
Laura slipped in.

“Forgive me, Mr. Baxter,” she said.
“I wanted to have just a word with you first.
Please sit down a moment.”

She seemed a little anxious and upset, thought Laurie,
as he sat down and looked at her in her evening dress
with the emblematic chain more apparent than ever.
Her frizzed hair sat as usual on the top of her head,
and her pince-nez glimmered at him across the hearthrug
like the eyes of a cat.

“It is this,” she said hurriedly.
“I felt I must just speak to you. I wasn’t
sure whether you quite realized the ... the dangers
of all this. I didn’t want you to ... to
run any risks in my house. I should feel responsible,
you know.”

She laughed nervously.

“Risks? Would you mind explaining?”
said Laurie.

“There ... there are always risks, you know.”

“What sort?”

“Oh ... you know ... nerves, and so on.
I ... I have seen people very much upset at seances,
more than once.”

“Oh yes, I believe it; but, you know, it seems
to me so natural now. Even if nothing happens
tonight, I don’t think I shall believe it any
the less.”

She was silent an instant.

“You know there are other risks,” she
said suddenly.

“What? Are things thrown about?”

“Please don’t laugh at it, Mr. Baxter.
I am quite serious.”

“Well—­what kind do you mean?”

Again she paused.

“It’s very awful,” she said; “but,
you know, people’s nerves do break down entirely
sometimes, even though they’re not in the least
afraid. I saw a case once—­”

She stopped.

“Yes?”

“It—­it was a very awful case.
A girl—­a sensitive—­broke down
altogether under the strain. She’s in an
asylum.”

“I don’t think that’s likely for
me,” said Laurie, with a touch of humor in his
voice. “And, after all, you run these risks,
don’t you—­and Mrs. Stapleton?”

“Yes; but you see we’re not sensitives.
And even I—­”

“Yes?”

“Well, even I feel sometimes rather overcome....
Mr. Baxter, do you quite realize what it all means?”

“I think so. To tell the truth—­”

He stopped.

“Yes; but the thing itself is really overwhelming....
There’s—­there’s an extraordinary
power sometimes. You know I was with Maud Stapleton
when she saw her father—­”

She stopped again.

“Yes?”

“I saw him too, you know.... Oh! there
was no possibility of fraud. It was with Mr.
Vincent. It—­it was rather terrible.”

“Yes?”

Page 75

“Maud fainted.... Please don’t tell
her I told you, Mr. Baxter; she wouldn’t like
you to know that. And then other things happen
sometimes which aren’t nice. Do you think
me a great coward? I—­I think I’ve
got a fit of nerves tonight.”

Laurie could see that she was trembling.

“I think you’re very kind,” he said,
“to take the trouble to tell me all this.
But indeed I was quite ready to be startled. I
quite understand what you mean—­but—­”

“Mr. Baxter, you can’t understand unless
you’ve experienced it. And, you know, the
other day here you knew nothing at all: you were
not conscious. Now tonight you’re to keep
awake; Mr. Vincent’s going to arrange to do
what he can about that. And—­and I don’t
quite like it.”

“Why, what on earth can happen?” asked
Laurie, bewildered.

“Mr. Baxter, I suppose you realize that it’s
you that they—­whoever they are—­are
interested in? There’s no kind of doubt
that you’ll be the center tonight. And
I did just want you to understand fully that there
are risks. I shouldn’t like to think—­”

Laurie stood up.

“I understand perfectly,” he said.
“Certainly, I always knew there were risks.
I hold myself responsible, and no one else. Is
that quite clear?”

The wire of the front-door bell suddenly twitched
in the hall, and a peal came up the stairs.

She hurried out, and he after her, as the footman
came up from the lower regions.

* * * *
*

The drawing-room presented an unusual appearance to
Laurie as he came in. All the small furniture
had been moved away to the side where the windows
looked into the street, and formed there what looked
like an amateur barricade. In the center of the
room, immediately below the electric light, stood
a solid small round table with four chairs set round
it as if for Bridge. There was on the side further
from the street a kind of ante-room communicating
with the main room by a high, wide archway nearly
as large as the room to which it gave access; and
within this, full in sight, stood a curious erection,
not unlike a confessional, seated within for one,
roofed, walled, and floored with thin wood. The
front of this was open, but screened partly by two
curtains that seemed to hang from a rod within.
The rest of the little extra room was entirely empty
except for the piano that stood closed in the corner.

There were two persons standing rather disconsolately
on the vacant hearthrug—­Mrs. Stapleton
and the clergyman whom Laurie had met on his last
visit here. Mr. Jamieson wore an expression usually
associated with funerals, and Mrs. Stapleton’s
face was full of suppressed excitement.

“Dearest, what a time you’ve been!
Was that Mr. Vincent?”

“I think so,” said Lady Laura.

Page 76

The two men nodded to one another, and an instant
later the medium came in.

He was in evening clothes; and, more than ever, Laurie
thought how average and conventional he looked.
His manner was not in the least pontifical, and he
shook hands cordially and naturally, but gave one
quick glance of approval at Laurie.

“It struck me as extraordinarily cold,”
he said. “I see you have an excellent fire.”
And he stooped, rubbing his hands together to warm
them.

“We must screen that presently,” he said.

Then he stood up again.

“There’s no use in wasting time.
May I say a word first, Lady Laura?”

She nodded, looking at him almost apprehensively.

“First, I must ask you gentlemen to give me
your word on a certain point. I have not an idea
how things will go, or whether we shall get any results;
but we are going to attempt materialization. Probably,
in any case, this will not go very far; we may not
be able to do more than to see some figure or face.
But in any case, I want you two gentlemen to give
me your word that you will attempt no violence.
Anything in the nature of seizing the figure may have
very disastrous results indeed to myself. You
understand that what you will see, if you see anything,
will not be actual flesh or blood; it will be formed
of a certain matter of which we understand very little
at present, but which is at any rate intimately connected
with myself or with someone present. Really we
know no more of it than that. We are all of us
inquirers equally. Now will you gentlemen give
me your words of honor that you will obey me in this;
and that in all other matters you will follow the
directions of ...” (he glanced at the two ladies)—­“of
Mrs. Stapleton, and do nothing without her consent?”

He spoke in a brisk, matter-of-fact way, and looked
keenly from face to face of the two men as he ended.

“I give you my word,” said Laurie.

“Yes; just so,” said Mr. Jamieson.

“Now there is one matter more,” went on
the medium. “Mr. Baxter, you are aware
that you are a sensitive of a very high order.
Now I do not wish you to pass into trance tonight.
Kindly keep your attention fixed upon me steadily.
Watch me closely: you will be able to see me quite
well enough, as I shall explain presently. Mrs.
Stapleton will sit with her back to the fire.
Lady Laura opposite, Mr. Jamieson with his back to
the cabinet, and you, Mr. Baxter, facing it. (Yes,
Mr. Jamieson, you may turn round freely, so long as
you keep your hands upon the table.) Now, if you feel
anything resembling sleep or unconsciousness coming
upon you irresistibly, Mr. Baxter, I wish you just
lightly to tap Mrs. Stapleton’s hand. She
will then, if necessary, break up the circle.
Give the signal directly you feel the sensation is
really coming on, or if you find it very difficult
to keep your attention fixed. You will do this?”

“I will do it,” said Laurie.

Page 77

“Then that is really all.”

He moved a step away from the fire. Then he paused.

“By the way, I may as well just tell you our
methods. I shall take my place within the cabinet,
drawing the curtains partly across at the top so as
to shade my face. But you will be able to see
the whole of my body, and probably even my face as
well. You four will please to sit at the table
in the order I have indicated, with your hands resting
upon it. You will not speak unless you are spoken
to, or until Mrs. Stapleton gives the signal.
That is all. You then wait. Now it may be
ten minutes, half an hour, an hour—­anything
up to two hours before anything happens. If there
is no result, Mrs. Stapleton will break up the circle
at eleven o’clock, and awaken me if necessary.”

He broke off.

“Kindly just examine the cabinet and the whole
room first, gentlemen. We mediums must protect
ourselves.”

He smiled genially and nodded to the two.

Laurie went straight across the open floor to the
cabinet. It was raised on four feet, about twelve
inches from the ground. Heavy green curtains
hung from a bar within. Laurie took these, and
ran them to and fro; then he went into the cabinet.
It was entirely empty except for a single board that
formed the seat. As he came out he encountered
the awestruck face of the clergyman who had followed
him in dead silence, and now went into the cabinet
after him. Laurie passed round behind: the
little room was empty except for the piano at the back,
and two low bookshelves on either side of the fireless
hearth. The window looking presumably into the
garden was shuttered from top to bottom, and barred,
and the curtains were drawn back so that it could
be seen. A cat could not have hidden in the place.
It was all perfectly satisfactory.

He came back to where the others were standing silent,
and the clergyman followed him.

“You are satisfied, gentlemen?” said the
medium, smiling.

“Perfectly,” said Laurie, and the clergyman
bowed.

“Well, then,” said the other, “it
is close upon nine.”

He indicated the chairs, and himself went past towards
the cabinet, his heavy step making the room vibrate
as he went. As he came near the door, he fumbled
with the button, and all the lights but one went out.

The four sat down. Laurie watched Mr. Vincent
step up into the cabinet, jerk the curtains this way
and that, and at last sit easily back, in such a way
that his face could be seen in a kind of twilight,
and the rest of his body perfectly visible.

Then silence came down upon the room.

II

The cat of the next house decided to go a-walking
after an excellent supper of herring-heads. He
had an appointment with a friend. So he cleaned
himself carefully on the landing outside the pantry,
evaded a couple of caresses from the young footman
lately come from the country, and finally leapt on
the window-sill, and sat there regarding the back
garden, the smoky wall beyond seen in the light of
the pantry window, and the chimney-pots high and forbidding
against the luminous night sky. His tail moved
with a soft ominous sinuousness as he looked.

Page 78

Presently he climbed cautiously out beneath the sash,
gathered himself for a spring, and the next instant
was seated on the boundary wall between his own house
and that of Lady Laura’s.

Here again he paused. That which served him for
a mind, that mysterious bundle of intuitions and instincts
by which he reckoned time, exchanged confidences,
and arranged experiences, informed him that the night
was yet young, and that his friend would not yet be
arrived. He sat there so still and so long, that
if it had not been for his resolute head and the blunt
spires of his ears, he would have appeared to an onlooker
below as no more than a humpy finial on an otherwise
regularly built wall. Now and again the last inch
of his tail twitched slightly, like an independent
member, as he contemplated his thoughts.

Overhead the last glimmer of day was utterly gone,
and in the place of it the mysterious glow of night
over a city hung high and luminous. He, a town-bred
cat, descended from generations of town-bred cats,
listened passively to the gentle roar of traffic that
stood, to him, for the running of brooks and the sighing
of forest trees. It was to him the auditory background
of adventure, romance, and bitter war.

The energy of life ran strong in his veins and sinews.
Once and again as that, which was for him imaginative
vision and anticipation, asserted itself, he crisped
his strong claws into the crumbling mortar, shooting
them, by an unconscious muscular action, from the
padded sheaths in which they lay. Once a furious
yapping sounded from a lighted window far beneath;
but he scorned to do more than turn a slow head in
the direction of it: then once more he resumed
his watch.

The time came at last, conveyed to him as surely as
by a punctual clock, and he rose noiselessly to his
feet. Then again he paused, and stretched first
one strong foreleg and then the other to its furthest
reach, shooting again his claws, conscious with a faint
sense of well-being of those tightly-strung muscles
rippling beneath his loose striped skin. They
would be in action presently. And, as he did so,
there looked over the parapet six feet above him, at
the top of the trellis up which presently he would
ascend, another resolute little head and blunt-spired
cars, and a soft indescribable voice spoke a gentle
insult. It was his friend ... and, he knew well
enough, on some high ridge in the background squatted
a young female beauty, with flattened ears and waving
tail, awaiting the caresses of the victor.

As he saw the head above him, to human eyes a shapeless
silhouette, to his eyes a grey-penciled picture perfect
in all its details, he paused in his stretching.
Then he sat back, arranged his tail, and lifted his
head to answer. The cry that came from him, not
yet fortissimo, sounded in human ears beneath
no more than a soft broken-hearted wail, but to him
who sat above it surpassed in insolence even his own
carefully modulated offensiveness.

Page 79

Again the other answered, this time lifting himself
to his full height, sending a message along the nerves
of his back that prickled his own skin and passed
out along the tail with an exquisite ripple of movement.
And once more came the answer from below.

So the preliminary challenge went on. Already
in the voice of each there had begun to show itself
that faint note of hysteria that culminates presently
in a scream of anger and a torrent of spits, leading
again in their turn to an ominous silence and the first
fierce clawing blows at eyes and ears. In another
instant the watcher above would recoil for a moment
as the swift rush was made up the trellis, and then
the battle would be joined: but that instant never
came. There fell a sudden silence; and he, peering
down into the grey gloom, chin on paws, and tail twitching
eighteen inches behind, saw an astonishing sight.
His adversary had broken off in the midst of a long
crescendo cry, and was himself crouched flat upon the
narrow wall staring now not upwards, but downwards,
diagonally, at a certain curtained window eight feet
below.

This was all very unusual and contrary to precedent.
A dog, a human hand armed with a missile, a furious
minatory face—­these things were not present
to account for the breach of etiquette. Vaguely
he perceived this, conscious only of inexplicability;
but he himself also ceased, and watched for developments.

Very slowly they came at first. That crouching
body beneath was motionless now; even the tail had
ceased to twitch and hung limply behind, dripping
over the edge of the narrow wall into the unfathomable
pit of the garden; and as the watcher stared, he felt
himself some communication of the horror so apparent
in the other’s attitude. Along his own
spine, from neck to flank, ran the paralyzing nervous
movement; his own tail ceased to move; his own ears
drew back instinctively, flattening themselves at
the sides of the square strong head. There was
a movement near by, and he turned quick eyes to see
the lithe young love of his heart stepping softly into
her place beside him. When he turned again his
adversary had vanished.

* * * *
*

Yet he still watched. Still there was no sound
from the window at which the other had stared just
now: no oblong of light shone out into the darkness
to explain that sudden withdrawal from the fray.

All was as silent as it had been just now; on all
sides windows were closed; now and then came a human
voice, just a word or two, spoken and answered from
one of those pits beneath, and the steady rumble of
traffic went on far away across the roofs; but here,
in the immediate neighborhood, all was at peace.
He knew well enough the window in question; he had
leapt himself upon the sill once and again and seen
the foodless waste of floor and carpet and furniture
within.

Page 80

Yet as he watched and waited his own horror grew.
That for which in men we have as yet no term was strong
within him, as in every beast that lives by perception
rather than reason; and he too by this strange faculty
knew well enough that something was abroad, raying
out from that silent curtained unseen window—­something
of an utterly different order from that of dog or
flung shoe and furious vituperation—­something
that affected certain nerves within his body in a
new and awful manner. Once or twice in his life
he had been conscious of it before, once in an empty
room, once in a room tenanted by a mere outline beneath
a sheet and closed by a locked door.

His heart too seemed melted within him; his tail too
hung limply behind the stucco parapet, and he made
no answering movement to the tiny crooning note that
sounded once in his ears.

And still the horror grew....

Presently he withdrew one claw from the crumbling
edge, raising his head delicately; and then the other.
For an instant longer he waited, feeling his back
heave uncontrollably. Then, dropping noiselessly
on to the lead, he fled beneath the sheltering parapet,
a noiseless shadow in the gloom; and his mate fled
with him.

Chapter IX

I

Laurie turned slowly over in bed, drew a long breath,
expelled it, and, releasing his arms from the bed-clothes,
sat up. He switched on the light by his bed,
glanced at his watch, switched off the light, and
sank down again into the sheets. He need not get
up just yet.

Then he remembered.

When an event of an entirely new order comes into
experience, it takes a little time to be assimilated.
It is as when a large piece of furniture is brought
into a room; all the rest of the furniture takes upon
itself a different value. A picture that did very
well up to then over the fire-place must perhaps be
moved. Values, relations, and balance all require
readjustment.

Now up to last night Laurie had indeed been convinced,
in one sense, of spiritualistic phenomena; but they
had not yet for him reached the point of significance
when they affected everything else. The new sideboard,
so to speak, had been brought into the room, but it
had been put temporarily against the wall in a vacant
space to be looked at; the owner of the room had not
yet realized the necessity of rearranging the whole.
But last night something had happened that changed
all this. He was now beginning to perceive the
need of a complete review of everything.

As he lay there, quiet indeed, but startlingly alert,
he first reviewed the single fact.

* * * *
*

About an hour or so had passed away before anything
particular happened. They had sat there, those
four, in complete silence, their hands upon the table,
occasionally shifting a little, hearing the sound
of one another’s breathing or the faint rustle
of one of the ladies’ dresses, in sufficient
light from the screened fire and the single heavily
shaded electric burner to recognize faces, and even,
after the first few minutes, to distinguish small objects,
or to read large print.

Page 81

For the most part Laurie had kept his eyes upon the
medium in the cabinet. There the man had leaned
back, plainly visible for the most part, with even
the paleness of his face and the dark blot of his
beard clearly discernible in the twilight. Now
and then the boy’s eyes had wandered to the
other faces, to the young clergyman’s opposite
downcast and motionless, with a sort of apprehensive
look and a determination not to give way—­to
the three-quarter profiles of the two women, and the
gleam of the pince-nez below Lady Laura’s frizzed
hair.

So he had sat, the thoughts at first racing through
his brain, then, as time went on, moving more and
more slowly, with his own brain becoming ever more
passive, until at last he had been compelled to make
a little effort against the drowsiness that had begun
to envelop him. He had had to do this altogether
three or four times, and had even begun to wonder
whether he should be able to resist much longer, when
a sudden trembling of the table had awakened him, alert
and conscious in a moment, and he had sat with every
faculty violently attentive to what should follow.

That trembling was a curious sensation beneath his
hands. At first it was no more than might be
caused by the passing of a heavy van in the street;
only there was no van. But it had increased, with
spasms and recoils, till it resembled a continuous
shudder as of a living rigid body. It began also
to tilt slightly this way and that.

Now all this, Laurie knew well, meant nothing at all—­or
rather, it need not. And when the movement passed
again through all the reverse motions, sinking at
last into complete stillness, he was conscious of
disappointment. A moment later, however, as he
glanced up again at the medium in the cabinet, he
drew his breath sharply, and Mr. Jamieson, at the
sound, wheeled his head swiftly to look.

There, in the cabinet, somewhere overhead behind the
curtain, a faint but perfectly distinct radiance was
visible. It was no more than a diffused glimmer,
but it was unmistakable, and it shone out faintly
and clearly upon the medium’s face. By its
light Laurie could make out every line and every feature,
the drooping clipped moustache, the strong jutting
nose, the lines from nostril to mouth, and the closed
eyes. As he watched the light deepened in intensity,
seeming to concentrate itself in the hidden corner
at the top. Then, with a smooth, steady motion
it emerged into full sight, in appearance like a softly
luminous globe of a pale bluish color, undefined at
the edges, floating steadily forward with a motion
like that of an air balloon, out into the room.
Once outside the cabinet it seemed to hesitate, hanging
at about the height of a man’s head—­then,
after an instant, it retired once more, re-entered
the cabinet, disappeared in the direction from which
it had come, and once more died out.

Well, there it had been; there was no doubt about
it.... And Laurie was unacquainted with any mechanism
that could produce it.

Page 82

The clergyman too had seemed affected. He had
watched, with turned-back head, the phenomenon from
beginning to end, and at the close, with a long indrawing
of breath, had looked once at Laurie, licked his dry
lips with a motion that was audible in that profound
silence, and once more dropped his eyes. The ladies
had been silent, and all but motionless throughout.

Well, the rest had happened comparatively quickly.

Once more, after the lapse of a few minutes, the radiance
had begun to reform; but this time it had emerged
almost immediately, diffused and misty like a nebula;
had hung again before the cabinet, and then, with
a strange, gently whirling motion, had seemed to arrange
itself in lines and curves.

Gradually, as he stared at it, it had begun to take
the shape and semblance of a head, swathed in drapery,
with that same drapery, hanging, as it appeared in
folds, dripping downwards to the ground, where it
lost itself in vagueness. Then, as he still stared,
conscious of nothing but the amazing fact, features
appeared to be forming—­first blots and
lines as of shadow, finally eyes, nose, mouth, and
chin as of a young girl....

A moment later there was no longer a doubt. It
was the face of Amy Nugent that was looking at him,
grave and steady—­as when he had seen it
in the moonlight above the sluice—­and behind,
seen half through the strange drapery, and half apart
from it, a couple of feet behind, the face of the
sleeping medium.

At that sight he had not moved nor spoken, it was
enough that the fact was there. Every power he
possessed was concentrated in the one effort of observation....

He heard from somewhere a gasping sigh, and there
rose up between him and the face the figure of the
clergyman, with his head turned back staring at the
apparition, and one hand only on the table, yet with
that hand so heavy upon it that the whole table shuddered
with his shudder.

There was a movement on the left, and he heard a fierce
feminine whisper—­

“Sit down, sir; sit down this instant....”

When the clergyman had again sunk down into his seat
with that same strong shudder, the luminous face was
already incoherent; the features had relapsed again
into blots and shadows, the drapery was absorbing
itself upwards into the center from which it came.
Once more the nebula trembled, moved backwards, and
disappeared. The next instant the radiance went
out, as if turned off by a switch. The medium
groaned gently and awoke.

Well, that had ended it. Laurie scarcely remembered
the talking that followed, the explanations, the apologies,
the hardly concealed terror of the young clergyman.
The medium had come out presently, dazed and confused.
They had talked ... and so forth. Then Laurie
had come home, still trying to assimilate the amazing
fact, of which he said that it could make no difference—­that
he had seen with his own eyes the face of Amy Nugent
four months after her death.

Page 83

Now here he was in bed on the following morning, trying
to assimilate it once more.

* * * *
*

It seemed to him as if sleep had done its work—­that
the subconscious intelligence had been able to take
the fact in—­and that henceforth it was
an established thing in his experience. He was
not excited now, but he was intensely and overwhelmingly
interested. There the thing was. Now what
difference did it make?

First, he understood that it made an enormous difference
to the value of the most ordinary things. It
really was true—­as true as tables and chairs—­that
there was a life after this, and that personality
survived. Never again could he doubt that for
one instant, even in the gloomiest mood. So long
as a man walks by faith, by the acceptance of authority,
human or Divine, there is always psychologically possible
the assertion of self, the instinct that what one has
not personally experienced may just conceivably be
untrue. But when one has seen—­so long
as memory does not disappear—­this agnostic
instinct is an impossibility. Every single act
therefore has a new significance. There is no
venture about it any more; there is, indeed, very little
opportunity for heroism. Once it is certain, by
the evidence of the senses, that death is just an
interlude, this life becomes merely part of a long
process....

Now as to the conduct of that life—­what
of religion? And here, for a moment or two, Laurie
was genuinely dismayed. For, as he looked at the
Catholic religion, he perceived that the whole thing
had changed. It no longer seemed august and dominant.
As he contemplated himself as he had been at Mass
on the previous morning, he seemed to have been rather
absurd. Why all this trouble, all this energy,
all these innumerable acts and efforts of faith?
It was not that his religion seemed necessarily untrue;
it was certainly possible for a man to hold simultaneously
Catholic and spiritualistic beliefs; there had not
been a hint last night against Christianity, and yet,
in the face of this evidence of the senses, Catholicism
seemed a very shadowy thing. It might well be
true, as any philosophy may be true, but—­did
it matter very much? To be enthusiastic about
it was the frenzy of an artist, who loves the portrait
more than the original—­and possibly a very
misleading and inadequate portrait. Laurie had
seen for himself the original last night; he had seen
a disembodied soul in a garb assumed for the purpose
of identification.... Did he need, then, a “religion?”
Was not his experience all-sufficing....?

Then suddenly all speculation fled away in the presence
of the personal element.

Three days ago he had contemplated the thought of
Amy with comparative indifference. She had been
to him lately little more than a “test case”
of the spiritual world, clothed about with the memory
of sentiment. Now once more she sprang into vivid
vital life as a person. She was not lost; his
relations with her were not just incidents of the
past; they were as much bound up with the present as
courtship has a continuity with married life.
She existed—­her very self—­and
communication was possible between them....

Page 84

Laurie rolled over on to his back. The thought
was violently overwhelming; there was a furious, absorbing
fascination in it. The gulf had been bridged;
it could be bridged again. Even if tales were
true, it could be bridged far more securely yet.
It was possible that the phantom he had seen could
be brought yet more forward into the world of sense,
that he could touch again with his very hand a tabernacle
enclosing her soul. So far spiritualism had not
failed him; why should he suspect it of failure in
the future? It had been done before; it could,
and should, be done again. Besides, there was
the pencil incident....

He threw off the clothes and sprang out of bed.
It was time to get up; time to begin again this fascinating,
absorbingly interesting earthly life, which now had
such enormous possibilities.

II

The rooms of Mr. James Morton were conveniently situated
up four flights of stairs in one of those blocks of
buildings, so mysterious to the layman, that lie not
a very long way from Charing Cross. There is
a silence always here as of college life, and the place
is frequented by the same curious selections from
the human race as haunt University courts. Here
are to be seen cooks, aged and dignified men, errand-boys,
and rather shabby old women.

The interior of the rooms, too, is not unlike that
of an ordinary rather second-rate college; and Mr.
James Morton’s taste did not redeem the chambers
in which he sat. From roof to floor the particular
apartment in which he sat was lined with bookshelves
filled with unprepossessing volumes and large black
tin boxes. A large table stood in the middle
of the room, littered with papers, with bulwarks of
the same kind of tin boxes rising at either end.

Mr. Morton himself was a square-built man of some
forty years, clean-shaven, and rather pale and stout,
with strongly marked features, a good loud voice,
and the pleasant, brusque manners that befit a University
and public school man who has taken seriously to business.

Laurie and he got on excellently together. The
younger man had an admiration for the older, whose
reputation as a rather distinguished barrister certainly
deserved it, and was sufficiently in awe of him to
pay attention to his directions in all matters connected
with law. But they did not meet much on other
planes. Laurie had asked the other down to Stantons
once, and had dined with him three or four times in
return. And there their acquaintance found its
limitations.

This morning, however, the boy’s interested
air, with its hints of suppressed excitement and his
marked inattention to the books and papers which were
his business, at last caused the older man to make
a remark. It was in his best manner.

“What’s the matter, eh?” he suddenly
shot at him, without prelude of any kind.

Laurie’s attention came back with a jump, and
he flushed a little.

Page 85

“Oh!—­er—­nothing particular,”
he murmured. And he set himself down to his books
again in silence, conscious of the watchful roving
eye on the other side of the table.

About half-past twelve Mr. Morton shut his own book
with a slap, leaned back, and began to fill his pipe.

“Nothing seems very important,” he said.

As the last uttered word had been spoken an hour previously,
Laurie was bewildered, and looked it.

“It won’t do, Baxter,” went on the
other. “You haven’t turned a page
an hour this morning.”

Laurie smiled doubtfully, and leaned back too.
Then he had a spasm of confidence.

“Yes. I’m rather upset this morning,”
he said. “The fact is, last night...”

Mr. Morton waited.

“Well?” he said. “Oh! don’t
tell if me you don’t want to.”

Laurie looked at him.

“I wonder what you’d say,” he said
at last.

The other got up with an abrupt movement, pushed his
books together, selected a hat, and put it on.

“I’m going to lunch,” he said.
“Got to be in the Courts at two; and....”

“Oh! wait a minute,” said Laurie.
“I think I want to tell you.”

“Well, make haste.” He stood, in
attitude to go.

“What do you think of spiritualism?”

“Blasted rot,” said Mr. Morton. “Anything
more I can do for you?”

“Do you know anything about it?”

“No. Don’t want to. Is that
all?”

“Well, look here;” said Laurie....
“Oh! sit down for two minutes.”

* * * *
*

Then he began. He described carefully his experiences
of the night before, explaining so much as was necessary
of antecedent events. The other during the course
of it tilted his hat back, and half leaned, half sat
against a side-table, watching the boy at first with
a genial contempt, and finally with the same curious
interest that one gives to a man with a new disease.

“Now, what d’you make of that?”
ended Laurie, flushed and superb.

“D’you want to know?” came after
a short silence.

Laurie nodded.

“What I said at the beginning, then.”

“What?”

“Blasted rot,” said Mr. Morton again.

Laurie frowned sharply, and affected to put his books
together.

“Of course, if you take it like that,”
he said. “But I don’t know what respect
you can possibly have for any evidence, if....”

“My dear chap, that isn’t evidence.
No evidence in the world could make me believe that
the earth was upside down. These things don’t
happen.”

“Then how do you explain...?”

“I don’t explain,” said Mr. Morton.
“The thing’s simply not worth looking
into. If you really saw that, you’re either
mad or else there was a trick.... Now come along
to lunch.”

“But I’m not the only one,” cried
Laurie hotly.

“No, indeed you’re not.... Look here,
Baxter, that sort of thing plays the devil with nerves.
Just drop it once and for all. I knew a chap
once who went in for all that. Well, the end was
what everybody knew would happen....”

Page 86

“Yes?” said Laurie.

“Went off his chump,” said the other briefly.
“Nasty mess all over the floor. Now come
to lunch.”

“Wait a second. You can’t argue from
particulars to universals. Was he the only one
you ever knew?”

The other paused a moment.

“No,” he said. “As it happens,
he wasn’t. I knew another chap—­he’s
a solicitor.... Oh! by the way, he’s one
of your people—­a Catholic, I mean.”

“Well, what about him?” “Oh! he’s
all right,” admitted Mr. Morton, with a grudging
air. “But he gave it up and took to religion
instead.”

“Yes? What’s his name?”

“Cathcart.”

He glanced up at the clock.

“Good Lord,” he said, “ten to one.”

Then he was gone.

* * * *
*

Laurie was far too exalted to be much depressed by
this counsel’s opinion; and had, indeed, several
minutes of delightful meditation on the crass complacency
of a clever man when taken off his ground. It
was deplorable, he said to himself, that men should
be so content with their limitations. But it
was always the way, he reflected. To be a specialist
in one point involved the pruning of all growth on
every other. Here was Morton, almost in the front
rank of his particular subject, and, besides, very
far from being a bookworm; yet, when taken an inch
out of his rut, he could do nothing but flounder.
He wondered what Morton would make of these things
if he saw them himself.

In the course of the afternoon Morton himself turned
up again. The case had ended unexpectedly soon.
Laurie waited till the closing of the shutters offered
an opportunity for a break in the work, and once more
returned to the charge.

“Look here, Baxter,” said the other almost
kindly, “I advise you to give this up.
It plays the very devil with nerves, as I told you.
Why, you’re as jumpy as a cat yourself.
And it isn’t worth it. If there was anything
in it, why it would be another thing; but....”

“I ... I wouldn’t give it up for
all the world,” stammered Laurie in his zeal.
“You simply don’t know what you’re
talking about. Why ... why, I’m not a fool
... I know that. And do you think I’m
ass enough to be taken in by a trick? And as
if a trick could be played like that in a drawing-room!
I tell you I examined every inch....”

“Look here,” said Morton, looking curiously
at the boy—­for there was something rather
impressive about Laurie’s manner—­“look
here; you’d better see old Cathcart. Know
him...? Well, I’ll introduce you any time.
He’ll tell you another tale. Of course,
I don’t believe all the rot he talks; but, at
any rate, he’s sensible enough to have given
it all up. Says he wouldn’t touch it with
a pole. And he was rather a big bug at it in
his time, I believe.”

Page 87

Laurie sneered audibly.

“Got frightened, I suppose,” he said.
“Of course, I know well enough that it’s
rather startling—­”

“My dear man, he was in the thick of it for
ten years. I’ll acknowledge his stories
are hair-raising, if one believed them; but then,
you see—­”

“What’s his address?”

Morton jerked his head towards the directories in
the bookshelf.

“Find him there,” he said. “I’ll
give you an introduction if you want it. Though,
mind you, I think he talks as much rot as anyone—­”

“What does he say?”

“Lord!—­I don’t know. Some
theory or other. But, at any rate, he’s
given it up.”

Laurie pursed his lips.

“I daresay I’ll ask you some time,”
he said. “Meanwhile—­”

“Meanwhile, for the Lord’s sake, get on
with that business you’ve got there.”

* * * *
*

Mr. Morton was indeed, as Laurie had reflected, extraordinarily
uninterested in things outside his beat; and his beat
was not a very extended one. He was a quite admirable
barrister, competent, alert, merciless and kindly
at the proper times, and, while at his business, thought
of hardly anything else at all. And when he was
not at his business, he threw himself with equal zest
into two or three other occupations—­golf,
dining out, and the collection of a particular kind
of chairs. Beyond these things there was for him
really nothing of value.

But, owing to circumstances, his beat had been further
extended to include Laurie Baxter, whom he was beginning
to like extremely. There was an air of romance
about Laurie, a pleasant enthusiasm, excellent manners,
and a rather delightful faculty of hero-worship.
Mr. Morton himself, too, while possessing nothing
even resembling a religion, was, like many other people,
not altogether unattracted towards those who had,
though he thought religiousness to be a sign of a slightly
incompetent character; and he rather liked Laurie’s
Catholicism, such as it was. It must be rather
pleasant, he considered (when he considered it at
all), to believe “all that,” as he would
have said.

So this new phase of Laurie’s interested him
far more than he would have allowed, so soon as he
became aware that it was not merely superficial; and,
indeed, Laurie’s constant return to the subject,
as well as his air of enthusiastic conviction, soon
convinced him that this was so.

Further, after a week or two, he became aware that
the young man’s work was suffering; and he heard
from his lips the expression of certain views that
seemed to the elder man extremely unhealthy.

For example, on a Friday evening, not much afterwards,
as Laurie was putting his books together, Mr. Morton
asked him where he was going to spend the week-end.

“Do you understand,” he said, “that
this is just everything to me? Do you know it’s
beginning to seem to me just the only thing that matters?
I’m quite aware that you think it all the most
utter bunkum; but, you see, I know it’s true.
And the whole thing is just like heaven opening....
Look here ... I didn’t tell you half the
other day. The fact is, that I was just as much
in love with this girl as—­as a man could
be. She died; and now—­”

“Of course it’s all rot! Do you think
I believe for one instant—­” He broke
off. “And so’s a nervous breakdown
all rot, isn’t it, and D.T.? They aren’t
real snakes, you know.”

Laurie smiled in a superior manner.

“And you’re getting yourself absorbed
in all this—­”

Laurie looked at him with a sudden flash of fanaticism.

“I tell you,” he said, “that it’s
all the world to me. And so would it be to you,
if—­”

“Oh, Lord! don’t become Salvation Army....
Seen Cathcart yet?”

“No. I haven’t the least wish to
see Cathcart.”

Morton rose, put his pens in the drawer, locked it;
slid half a dozen papers into a black tin box, locked
that too, and went towards his coat and hat, all in
silence.

As he went out he turned on the threshold.

“When’s that man coming back from Ireland?”
he said.

“Who? Vincent? Oh! another month yet.
We’re going to have another try when he comes.”

“Try? What at?”

“Materialization,” said Laurie. “That’s
to say—­”

Page 89

“I don’t want to know what the foul thing
means.”

He still paused, looking hard at the boy. Then
he sniffed.

“A young fool,” he said. “I
repeat it.... Lock up when you come....
Good night.”

Chapter X

I

Mrs. Baxter possessed one of the two secrets of serenity.
The other need not be specified; but hers arose from
the most pleasant and most human form of narrow-mindedness.
As has been said before, when things did not fit with
her own scheme, either they were not things, but only
fancies of somebody inconsiderable, or else she resolutely
disregarded them. She had an opportunity of testing
her serenity on one day early in February.

She rose as usual at a fixed hour—­eight
o’clock—­and when she was ready knelt
down at her prie-Dieu. This was quite an
elaborate structure, far more elaborate than the devotions
offered there. It was a very beautiful inlaid
Florentine affair, and had a little shelf above it
filled with a number of the little leather-bound books
in which her soul delighted. She did not use
these books very much; but she liked to see them there.
It would not be decent to enter the sanctuary of Mrs.
Baxter’s prayers; it is enough to say that they
were not very long. Then she rose from her knees,
left her large comfortable bedroom, redolent with
soap and hot water, and came downstairs, a beautiful
slender little figure in black lace veil and rich
dress, through the sunlight of the staircase, into
the dining-room.

There she took up her letters and packets. They
were not exciting. There was an unimportant note
from a friend, a couple of bills, and a Bon Marche
catalogue; and she scrutinized these through her spectacles,
sitting by the fire. When she had done she noticed
a letter lying by Maggie’s place, directed in
a masculine hand. An instant later Maggie came
in herself, in her hat and furs, a charming picture,
fresh from the winter sunlight and air, and kissed
her.

While Mrs. Baxter poured out tea she addressed a remark
or two to the girl, but only got back those vague
inattentive murmurs that are the sign of a distracted
mind; and, looking up presently with a sense of injury,
noticed that Maggie was reading her letter with extraordinary
diligence.

“My dear, I am speaking to you,” said
Mrs. Baxter, with an air of slightly humorous dignity.

“Er—­I am sorry,” murmured Maggie,
and continued reading.

Mrs. Baxter put out her hand for the Bon Marche
catalogue in order to drive home her sense of injury,
and met Maggie’s eyes, suddenly raised to meet
her own, with a curious strained look in them.

“Darling, what is the matter?”

Maggie still stared at her a moment, as if questioning
both herself and the other, and finally handed the
letter across with an abrupt movement.

“Read it,” she said.

Page 90

It was rather a business to read it. It involved
spectacles, a pushing aside of a plate, and a slight
turning to catch the light. Mrs. Baxter read
it, and handed it back, making three or four times
the sound written as “Tut.”

“The tiresome boy!” she said querulously,
but without alarm.

“What are we to do? You see, Mr. Morton
thinks we ought to do something. He mentions
a Mr. Cathcart.”

Mrs. Baxter reached out for the toast-rack.

“My dear, there’s nothing to be done.
You know what Laurie is. It’ll only make
him worse.”

Maggie looked at her uneasily.

“I wish we could do something,” she said.

“My dear, he’d have written to me—­Mr.
Morton, I mean—­if Laurie had been really
unwell. You see he only says he doesn’t
attend to his work as he ought.”

Maggie took up the letter, put it carefully back into
the envelope, and went on with breakfast. There
was nothing more to be said just then.

But she was uneasy, and after breakfast went out into
the garden, spud in hand, to think it all over, with
the letter in her pocket.

Certainly the letter was not alarming per se,
but per accidens—­that is to say,
taking into account who it was that had written, she
was not so sure. She had met Mr. Morton but once,
and had formed of him the kind of impression that
a girl would form of such a man in the hours of a
week-end—­a brusque, ordinary kind of barrister
without much imagination and a good deal of shrewd
force. It was surely rather an extreme step for
a man like this to write to a girl in such a condition
of things, asking her to use her influence to dissuade
Laurie from his present course of life. Plainly
the man meant what he said; he had not written to
Mrs. Baxter, as he explained in the letter, for fear
of alarming her unduly, and, as he expressly said,
there was nothing to be alarmed about. Yet he
had written.

Maggie stopped at the lower end of the orchard path,
took out the letter, and read the last three or four
sentences again:

Please forgive me if you think it was
unnecessary to write. Of course I have no
doubt whatever that the whole thing is nothing
but nonsense; but even nonsense can have a bad
effect, and Mr. Baxter seems to me to be far too much
wrapped up in it. I enclose the address of a friend
of mine in case you would care to write to him
on the subject. He was once a Spiritualist,
and is now a devout Catholic. He takes a
view of it that I do not take; but at any rate
his advice could do no harm. You can trust him
to be absolutely discreet.

Believe me,
Yours sincerely,
James Morton

It really was very odd and unconventional; and Mr.
Morton had not seemed at all an odd or unconventional
person. He mentioned, too, a particular date,
February 25, as the date by which the medium would
have returned, and some sort of further effort was
going to be made; but he did not attempt to explain
this, nor did Maggie understand it. It only seemed
to her rather sinister and unpleasant.

Page 91

She turned over the page, and there was the address
he had mentioned—­a Mr. Cathcart. Surely
he did not expect her to write to this stranger....

She walked up and down with her spud for another half-hour
before she could come to any conclusion. Certainly
she agreed with Mr. James Morton that the whole thing
was nonsense; yet, further, that this nonsense was
capable of doing a good deal of harm to an excitable
person. Besides, Laurie obviously had a bad conscience
about it, or he would have mentioned it.

She caught sight of Mrs. Baxter presently through
the thick hedge, walking with her dainty, dignified
step along the paths of the kitchen garden; and a
certain impatience seized her at the sight. This
boy’s mother was so annoyingly serene.
Surely it was her business, rather than Maggie’s
own, to look after Laurie; yet the girl knew perfectly
well that if Laurie was left to his mother nothing
at all would be done. Mrs. Baxter would deplore
it all, of course, gently and tranquilly, in Laurie’s
absence, and would, perhaps, if she were hard pressed,
utter a feeble protest even in his presence; and that
was absolutely all....

“Maggie! Maggie!” came the gentle
old voice, calling presently; and then to some unseen
person, “Have you seen Miss Deronnais anywhere?”

Maggie put the letter in her pocket and hurried through
from the orchard.

“Yes?” she said, with a half hope.

“Come in, my dear, and tell me what you think
of those new teacups in the Bon Marche catalogue,”
said the old lady. “There seem some beautiful
new designs, and we want another set.”

Maggie bowed to the inevitable. But as they passed
up the garden her resolution was precipitated.

“Can you let me go by twelve,” she said.
“I rather want to see Father Mahon about something.”

“My dear, I shall not keep you three minutes,”
protested the old lady.

And they went in to talk for an hour and three-quarters.

II

Father Mahon was a conscientious priest. He said
his mass at eight o’clock; he breakfasted at
nine; he performed certain devotions till half-past
ten; read the paper till eleven, and theology till
twelve. Then he considered himself at liberty
to do what he liked till his dinner at one. (The rest
of his day does not concern us just now.)

He, too, was looking round his garden this morning—­a
fine, solid figure of a man, in rather baggy trousers,
short coat, and expansive waistcoat, with every button
doing its duty. He too, like Mr. James Morton,
had his beat, an even narrower one than the barrister’s,
and even better trodden, for he never strayed off
it at all, except for four short weeks in the summer,
when he hurried across to Ireland and got up late,
and went on picnics with other ecclesiastics in straw
hats, and joined in cheerful songs in the evening.
He was a priest, with perfectly defined duties, and

Page 92

of admirable punctuality and conscientiousness in
doing them. He disliked the English quite extraordinarily;
but his sense of duty was such that they never suspected
it; and his flock of Saxons adored him as people only
can adore a brisk, businesslike man with a large heart
and peremptory ways, who is their guide and father,
and is perfectly aware of it. His sermons consisted
of cold-cut blocks of dogma taken perseveringly from
sermon outlines and served up Sunday by Sunday with
a sauce of a slight and delightful brogue. He
could never have kindled the Thames, nor indeed any
river at all, but he could bridge them with solid
stones; and this is, perhaps, even more desirable.

Maggie had begun by disliking him. She had thought
him rather coarse and stupid; but she had changed
her mind. He was not what may be called subtle;
he had no patience at all with such things as scruples,
nuances, and shades of tone and meaning; but
if you put a plain question to him plainly, he gave
you a plain answer, if he knew it; if not, he looked
it up then and there; and that is always a relief in
this intricate world. Maggie therefore did not
bother him much; she went to him only on plain issues;
and he respected and liked her accordingly.

“Good morning, my child,” he said in his
loud, breezy voice, as he came in to find her in his
hideous little sitting-room. “I hope you
don’t mind the smell of tobacco-smoke.”

The room indeed reeked; he had started a cigar, according
to rule, as the clock struck twelve, and had left
it just now upon a stump outside when his housekeeper
had come to announce a visitor.

“Not in the least, thanks, father.... May
I sit down? It’s rather a long business,
I’m afraid.”

The priest pulled out an arm-chair covered with horsehair
and an antimacassar.

“Sit down, my child.”

Then he sat down himself, opposite her, in his trousers
at once tight and baggy, with his rather large boots
cocked one over the other, and his genial red face
smiling at her.

“Now then,” he said.

“It’s not about myself, father,”
she began rather hurriedly. “It’s
about Laurie Baxter. May I begin at the beginning?”

He nodded. He was not sorry to hear something
about this boy, whom he didn’t like at all,
but for whom he knew himself at least partly responsible.
The English were bad enough, but English converts were
indescribably trying; and Laurie had been on his mind
lately, he scarcely knew why.

Then Maggie began at the beginning, and told the whole
thing, from Amy’s death down to Mr. Morton’s
letter. He put a question or two to her during
her story, looking at her with pressed lips, and finally
put out his hand for the letter itself.

“Mrs. Baxter doesn’t know what I’ve
come about,” said the girl. “You
won’t give her a hint, will you, father?”

He nodded reassuringly to her, absorbed in the letter,
and presently handed it back, with a large smile.

Page 93

“He seems a sensible fellow,” he said.

“Ah! that’s what I wanted to ask you,
father. I don’t know anything at all about
spiritualism. Is it—­is it really all
nonsense? Is there nothing in it at all?”

He laughed aloud.

“I don’t think you need be afraid,”
he said. “Of course we know that souls
don’t come back like that. They’re
somewhere else.”

“Then it’s all fraud?”

“It’s practically all fraud,” he
said, “but it’s very superstitious, and
is forbidden by the Church.”

This was straight enough. It was at least a clear
issue to begin to attack Laurie upon.

“Then—­then that’s the evil
of it?” she said. “There’s no
real power underneath? That’s what Mr.
Rymer said to Mrs. Baxter; and it’s what I’ve
always thought myself.”

The priest’s face became theological.

“Let’s see what Sabetti says,” he
said. “I fancy—­”

He turned in his chair and fetched out a volume behind
him.

“Here we are....”

He ran his finger down the heavy paragraphs, turned
a page or two, and began a running comment and translation:
“’Necromantia ex’....
’Necromancy arising from invocation of the dead’....
Let’s see ... yes, ’Spiritism, or the
consulting of spirits in order to know hidden things,
especially that pertain to the future life, certainly
is divination properly so called, and is ... is full
of even more impiety than is magnetism, or the use
of turning tables. The reason is, as the Baltimore
fathers testify, that such knowledge must necessarily
be ascribed to Satanic intervention, since in no other
manner can it be explained.’”

“Then—­” began Maggie.

“One moment, my child.... Yes ... just
so. ’Express divination’....
No, no. Ah! here we are, ’Tacit divination,
... even if it is openly protested that no commerce
with the Demon is intended, is per se grave
sin; but it can sometimes be excused from mortal sin,
on account of simplicity or ignorance or a lack of
certain faith.’ You see, my child—­”
he set the book back in its place “—­so
far as it’s not fraud it’s diabolical.
And that’s an end of it.”

“But do you think it’s not all fraud,
then?” asked the girl, paling a little.

He laughed again, with a resonance that warmed her
heart.

“I should pay just no attention to it all.
Tell him, if you like, what I’ve said, and that
it’s grave sin for him to play with it; but don’t
get thinking that the devil’s in everything.”

Maggie was puzzled.

“Then it’s not the devil?” she asked—­“at
least not in this case, you think?”

He smiled again reassuringly.

“I should suspect it was a clever trick,”
he said. “I don’t think Master Laurie’s
likely to get mixed up with the devil in that way.
There’s plenty of easier ways than that.”

“Do you think I should write to Mr. Cathcart?”

“Just as you like. He’s a convert,
isn’t he? I believe I’ve heard his
name.”

Page 94

“I think so.”

“Well, it wouldn’t do any harm; though
I should suspect not much good.”

Maggie was silent.

“Just tell Master Laurie not to play tricks,”
said the priest. “He’s got a good,
sensible friend in Mr. Morton. I can see that.
And don’t trouble your head too much about it,
my child.”

* * * *
*

When Maggie was gone, he went out to finish his cigar,
and found to his pleasure that it was still alight,
and after a puff or two it went very well.

He thought about his interview for a few minutes as
he walked up and down, taking the bright winter air.
It explained a good deal. He had begun to be
a little anxious about this boy. It was not that
Laurie had actually neglected his religion while at
Stantons; he was always in his place at mass on Sundays,
and even, very occasionally, on weekdays as well.
And he had had a mass said for Amy Nugent. But
even as far back as the beginning of the previous
year, there had been an air about him not altogether
reassuring.

Well, this at any rate was a small commentary on the
present situation.... (The priest stopped to look
at some bulbs that were coming up in the bed beside
him, and stooped, breathing heavily, to smooth the
earth round one of them with a large finger.)...
And as for this Spiritualistic nonsense—­of
course the whole thing was a trick. Things did
not happen like that. Of course the devil could
do extraordinary things: or at any rate had been
able to do them in the past; but as for Master Laurie
Baxter—­whose home was down there in the
hamlet, and who had been at Oxford and was now reading
law—­as for the thought that this rather
superior Saxon young man was in direct communication
with Satan at the present time—­well, that
needed no comment but loud laughter.

Yet it was very unwholesome and unhealthy. That
was the worst of these converts; they could not be
content with the sober workaday facts of the Catholic
creed. They must be always running after some
novelty or other.... And it was mortal sin anyhow,
if the sinner had the faintest idea—­

A large dinner-bell pealed from the back door; and
the priest went in to roast beef with Yorkshire pudding,
apple dumplings, and a single glass of port-wine to
end up with.

III

It was strange how Maggie felt steadied and encouraged
in the presence of something at least resembling danger.
So long as Laurie was merely tiresome and foolish,
she distrusted herself, she made little rules and
resolutions, and deliberately kept herself interiorly
detached from him. But now that there was something
definite to look to, her sensitiveness vanished.

As to what that something was, she did not trust herself
to decide. Father Mahon had given her a point
to work at—­the fact that the thing, as
a serious pursuit, was forbidden; as to what the reality
behind was, whether indeed there were any reality at
all, she did not allow herself to consider. Laurie
was in a state of nerves sufficiently troublesome
to bring a letter from his friend and guide; and he
was in that state through playing tricks on forbidden
ground; that was enough.

Page 95

Her interview with Father Mahon precipitated her half-formed
resolution; and after tea she went upstairs to write
to Mr. Cathcart.

It was an unconventional thing to do, but she was
sufficiently perturbed to disregard that drawback,
and she wrote a very sensible letter, explaining first
who she was; then, without any names being mentioned,
she described her adopted brother’s position,
and indicated his experiences: she occupied the
last page in asking two or three questions, and begging
for general advice.

* * * *
*

Mrs. Baxter displayed some symptoms after dinner which
the girl recognized well enough. They comprised
a resolute avoidance of Laurie’s name, a funny
stiff little air of dignity, and a touch of patronage.
And the interpretation of these things was that the
old lady did not wish the subject to be mentioned
again, and that, interiorly, she was doing her best
ignore and forget it. Maggie felt, again, vaguely
comforted; it left her a freer hand.

* * * *
*

She lay awake a long time that night.

Her room was a little square one on the top of the
stairs, above the smoking-room where she had that
odd scene with Laurie a month or so before, and looking
out upon the yew walk that led to the orchard.
It was a cheerful little place enough, papered in
brown, hung all over with water colors, with her bed
in one corner; and it looked a reassuring familiar
kind of place in the firelight, as she lay open-eyed
and thinking.

It was not that she was at all frightened; it was
no more than a little natural anxiety; and half a
dozen times in the hour or two that she lay thinking,
she turned resolutely over in bed, dismissed the little
pictures that her mind formed in spite of herself,
and began to think of pleasant, sane subjects.

But the images recurred. They were no more than
little vignettes—­Laurie talking to a severe-looking
tall man with a sardonic smile; Laurie having tea
with Mrs. Stapleton; Laurie in an empty room, looking
at a closed door....

It was this last picture that recurred three or four
times at the very instant that the girl was drowsing
off into sleep; and it had therefore that particular
vividness that characterizes the thoughts when the
conscious attention is dormant. It had too a strangely
perturbing effect upon her; and she could not imagine
why.

After the third return of it her sense of humor came
to the rescue: it was too ridiculous, she said,
to be alarmed at an empty room and Laurie’s
back. Once more she turned on her side, away from
the firelight, and resolved, if it recurred again,
to examine the details closely.

Again the moments passed: thought followed thought,
in those quiet waves that lull the mind towards sleep;
finally once more the picture was there, clear and
distinct.

Yes; she would look at it this time.

Page 96

It was a bare room, wainscoted round the walls a few
inches up, papered beyond in some common palish pattern.
Laurie stood in the center of the uncarpeted boards,
with his back turned to her, looking, it seemed, with
an intense expectation at the very dull door in the
wall opposite him. He was in his evening dress,
she saw, knee-breeches and buckles all complete; and
his hands were clenched, as they hung held out a little
from his sides, as he himself, crouching a little,
stared at the door.

She, too, looked at the door, at its conventional
panels and its brass handle; and it appeared to her
as if both he and she were expectant of some visitor.
The door would open presently, she perceived; and the
reason why Laurie was so intent upon the entrance,
was that he, no more than she, had any idea as to
the character of the person who was to come in.
She became quite interested as she watched—­it
was a method she followed sometimes when wooing sleep—­and
she began, in her fancy, to go past Laurie as if to
open the door. But as she passed him she was
aware that he put out a hand to check her, as if to
hold her back from some danger; and she stopped, hesitating,
still looking, not at Laurie, but at the door.

She began then, with the irresponsibility of deepening
sleep, to imagine instead what lay beyond the door—­to
perceive by intuitive vision the character of the
house. She got so far as understanding that it
was all as unfurnished as this room, that the house
stood solitary among trees, and that even these, and
the tangled garden that she determined must surround
the house, were as listening and as expectant as herself
and the waiting figure of the boy. Once more,
as if to verify her semi-passive imaginative excursion,
she moved to the door....

Ah! what nonsense it was. Here she was, wide
awake again, in her own familiar room, with the firelight
on the walls.

... Well, well; sleep was a curious thing; and
so was imagination....

... At any rate she had written to Mr. Cathcart.

Chapter XI

I

The “Cock Inn” is situated in Fleet Street,
not twenty yards from Mitre Court and scarcely fifty
from the passage that leads down to the court where
Mr. James Morton still has his chambers.

It was a convenient place, therefore, for Laurie to
lunch in, and he generally made his appearance there
a few minutes before one o’clock to partake
of a small rump steak and a pewter mug of beer.
Sometimes he came alone, sometimes in company; and
by a carefully thought out system of tips he usually
managed to have reserved for him at least until one
o’clock a particular seat in a particular partition
in that row of stable-like shelters that run the length
of the room opposite the door on the first floor.

On the twenty-third of February, however—­it
was a Friday, by the way, and boiled plaice would
have to be eaten instead of rump steak—­he
was a little annoyed to find his seat already occupied
by a small, brisk-looking man with a grey beard and
spectacles, who, with a newspaper propped in front
of him, was also engaged in the consumption of boiled
plaice.

Page 97

The little man looked up at him sharply, like a bird
disturbed in a meal, and then down again upon the
paper. Laurie noticed that his hat and stick
were laid upon the adjoining chair as if to retain
it. He hesitated an instant; then he slid in
on the other side, opposite the stranger, tapped his
glass with his knife, and sat down.

When the waiter came, a familiarly deferential man
with whiskers, Laurie, with a slight look of peevishness,
gave his order, and glanced reproachfully at the occupied
seat. The waiter gave the ghost of a shrug with
his shoulders, significant of apologetic helplessness,
and went away.

A minute later Mr. Morton entered, glanced this way
and that, nodding imperceptibly to Laurie, and was
just moving off to a less occupied table when the
stranger looked up.

“Mr. Morton,” he cried, “Mr. Morton!”
in an odd voice that seemed on the point of cracking
into falsetto. Certainly he was very like a portly
bird, thought Laurie.

The other turned round, nodded with short geniality,
and slid into the chair from which the old man moved
his hat and stick with zealous haste.

“And what are you doing here?” said Mr.
Morton.

“Just taking a bite like yourself,” said
the other. “Friday—­worse luck.”

Laurie was conscious of a touch of interest.
This man was a Catholic, then, he supposed.

For a moment the name meant nothing to Laurie; then
he remembered; but his rising suspicions were quelled
instantly by his friend’s next remark.

“By the way, Cathcart, we were talking of you
a week or two ago.”

“Indeed! I am flattered,” said the
old man perkily. Yes, “perky” was
the word, thought Laurie.

“Mr. Baxter here is interested in Spiritualism—­rump
steak, waiter, and pint of bitter—­and I
told him you were the man for him.”

Laurie interiorly drew in his horns.

“A—­er—­an experimenter?”
asked the old man, with courteous interest, his eyes
giving a quick gleam beneath his glasses.

“A little.”

“Yes. Most dangerous—­most dangerous....
And any success, Mr. Baxter?”

Laurie felt his annoyance deepen.

“Very considerable success,” he said shortly.

“Ah, yes—­you must forgive me, sir;
but I have had a good deal of experience, and I must
say—­You are a Catholic, I see,” he
said, interrupting himself. “Or a High
Churchman.”

“I am a Catholic,” said Laurie.

“So’m I. But I gave up spiritualism as
soon as I became one. Very interesting experiences,
too; but—­well, I value my soul too much,
Mr. Baxter.”

Mr. Morton put a large piece of potato into his mouth
with a detached air.

It was really rather trying, thought Laurie, to be
catechized in this way; so he determined to show superiority.

Page 98

“And you think it all superstition and nonsense?”
he asked.

“Indeed, no,” said the old man shortly.

Laurie pushed his plate on one side, and drew the
cheese towards him. This was a little more interesting,
he thought, but he was still far from feeling communicative.

“What then?” he asked.

“Oh, very real indeed,” said the old man.
“That is just the danger.”

“The danger?”

“Yes, Mr. Baxter. Of course there’s
plenty of fraud and trickery; we all know that.
But it’s the part that’s not fraud that’s—­May
I ask what medium you go to?”

“I know Mr. Vincent. And I’ve been
to some public seances, too.”

The old man looked at him with sudden interest, but
said nothing.

“You think he’s not honest?” said
Laurie, with cool offensiveness.

“Oh, yes; he’s perfectly honest,”
said the other deliberately. “I’ll
trouble you for the sugar, Mr. Morton.”

Laurie was determined not to begin the subject again.
He felt that he was being patronized and lectured,
and did not like it. And once again the suspicion
crossed his mind that this was an arranged meeting.
It was so very neat—­two days before the
seance—­the entry of Morton—­his
own seat occupied. Yet he did not feel quite courageous
enough to challenge either of them. He ate his
cheese deliberately and waited, listening to the talk
between the two on quite irrelevant subjects, and
presently determined on a bit of bravado.

“May I look at the Daily Mirror, Mr.
Cathcart?” he asked.

“There is no doubt of his guilt,” the
old man said, as he handed the paper across (the two
were deep in a law case now). “I said so
to Markham a dozen times—­” and so
on.

But there was no more word of spiritualism. Laurie
propped the paper before him as he finished his cheese,
and waited for coffee, and read with unseeing eyes.
He was resenting as hard as he could the abruptness
of the opening and closing of the subject, and the
complete disregard now shown to him. He drank
his coffee, still leisurely, and lit a cigarette;
and still the two talked.

He stood up at last and reached down his hat and stick.
The old man looked up.

“You are going, Mr. Baxter...? Good day....
Well then; and as I was waiting in court—­”

Laurie passed out indignantly, and went down the stairs.

So that was Mr. Cathcart. Well, he was thankful
he hadn’t written to him, after all. He
was not his kind in the least.

II

The moment he passed out of the door the old man stopped
his fluent talking and waited, looking after the boy.
Then he turned again to his friend.

“I’m a blundering idiot,” he said.

Mr. Morton sniffed.

“I’ve put him against me now—­Lord
knows how; but I’ve done it; and he won’t
listen to me.”

Page 99

“Gad!” said Mr. Morton; “what funny
people you all are! And you really meant what
you said?”

“First,” said the old man, with the same
unruffled cheerfulness, “he wouldn’t have
come. We’ve muddled it. We’d
much better have been straightforward. Secondly,
he thinks me an old fool—­as you do, only
more so. No; we must set to work some other way
now.... Tell me about Miss Deronnais: I
showed you her letter?”

The other nodded, helping himself to cheese.

“I told her that I was at her service, of course;
and I haven’t heard again. Sensible girl?”

“Very sensible, I should say.”

“Sort of girl that wouldn’t scream or
faint in a crisis?”

“Exactly the opposite, I should say. But
I’ve hardly seen her, you know.”

“Well, well.... And the mother?”

“No good at all,” said Mr. Morton.

“Then the girl’s the sheet anchor....
In love with him, do you know?”

“Lord! How d’you expect me to know
that?”

The old man pondered in silence, seeming to assimilate
the situation.

“He’s in a devil of a mess,” he
said, with abrupt cheerfulness. “That man
Vincent—­”

“Well?”

“He’s the most dangerous of the lot.
Just because he’s honest.”

“Good God!” broke in the other again suddenly.
“Do all Catholics believe this rubbish?”

“My dear friend, of course they don’t.
Not one in a thousand. I wish they did.
That’s what’s the matter. But they
laugh at it—­laugh at it!"... His voice
cracked into shrill falsetto.... “Laugh
at hell-fire.... Is Sunday the day, did you say?”

“He told me the twenty-fifth.”

“And at that woman’s in Queen’s
Gate, I suppose?”

“Expect so. He didn’t say. Or
I forget.”

“I heard they were at their games there again,”
said Mr. Cathcart with meditative geniality.
“I’d like to blow up the stinking hole.”

Mr. Morton chuckled audibly.

“You’re the youngest man of your years
I’ve ever come across,” he said.
“No wonder you believe all that stuff. When
are you going to grow up, Cathcart?”

The old man paid no attention at all.

“Well—­that plot’s over,”
he said again. “Now for Miss Deronnais.
But we can’t stop this Sunday affair; that’s
certain. Did he tell you anything about it?
Materialization? Automatic—­”

“Lord, I don’t know all that jargon....”

“My dear Morton, for a lawyer, you’re
the worst witness I’ve ever—­Well,
I’m off. No more to be done today.”

* * * *
*

The other sat on a few minutes over his pipe.

It seemed to him quite amazing that a sensible man
like Cathcart could take such rubbish seriously.
In every other department of life the solicitor was
an eminently shrewd and sane man, with, moreover, a
youthful kind of brisk humor that is perhaps the surest
symptom of sanity that it is possible to have.

Page 100

He had seen him in court for years past under every
sort of circumstance, and if it had been required
of him to select a character with which superstition
and morbid humbug could have had nothing in common,
he would have laid his hand upon the senior partner
of Cathcart and Cathcart. Yet here was this sane
man, taking this fantastic nonsense as if there were
really something in it. He had first heard him
speak of the subject at a small bachelor dinner party
of four in the rooms of a mutual friend; and, as he
had listened, he had had the same sensation as one
would have upon hearing a Cabinet Minister, let us
say, discussing stump-cricket with enthusiasm.
Cathcart had said all kinds of things when once he
was started—­all with that air of businesslike
briskness that was so characteristic of him and so
disconcerting in such a connection. If he had
apologized for it as an amiable weakness, if he had
been in the least shamefaced or deprecatory, it would
have been another matter; one would have forgiven
it as one forgives any little exceptional eccentricity.
But to hear him speak of materialization as of a process
as normal (though unusual) as the production of radium,
and of planchette as of wireless telegraphy—­as
established, indubitable facts, though out of the range
of common experience—­this had amazed this
very practical man. Cathcart had hinted too of
other things—­things which he would not
amplify—­of a still more disconcertingly
impossible nature—­matters which Morton
had scarcely thought had been credible even to the
darkest medievalists; and all this with that same sharp,
sane humor that lent an air of reality to all that
he said.

For romantic young asses like Laurie Baxter such things
were not so hopelessly incongruous, though obviously
they were bad for him; they were all part of the wild
credulousness of a religious youth; but for Cathcart,
aged sixty-two, a solicitor in good practice, with
a wife and two grown-up daughters, and a reputation
for exceptionally sound shrewdness—! But
it must be remembered he was a Catholic!

So Mr. James Morton sat in the “Cock”
and pondered. He was not sorry he had tried to
take steps to choke off this young fool, and he was
just a little sorry that so far they had failed.
He had written to Miss Deronnais in an impulse, after
an unusually feverish outburst from the boy; and she,
he had learnt later, had written to Mr. Cathcart.
The rest had been of the other’s devising.

Well, it had failed so far. Perhaps next week
things would be better.

He paid his bill, left two pence for the waiter, and
went out. He had a case that afternoon.

III

Laurie left chambers as it was growing dark that afternoon,
and went back to his rooms for tea. He had passed,
as was usual now, an extremely distracted couple of
hours, sitting over his books with spasmodic efforts
only to attend to them. He was beginning, in fact,
to be not quite sure whether Law after all was his
vocation....

Page 101

His kettle was singing pleasantly on the hob, and
a tray glimmered in the firelight on the little table,
as the woman had left it; and it was not until he
had poured himself out a cup of tea that he saw on
the white cloth an envelope, directed to him, inscribed
“By hand,” in the usual handwriting of
persons engaged in business. Even then he did
not open it at once; it was probably only some note
connected with his chief’s affairs.

For half an hour more he sat on, smoking after tea,
pondering that which was always in his mind now, and
dwelling with a vague pleasant expectancy on what
Sunday night should bring forth. Mr. Vincent,
he knew, was returning to town that afternoon.
Perhaps, even, he might look in for a few minutes,
if there were any last instructions to be given.

The effect of the medium on the young man’s
mind had increased enormously during these past weeks.
That air of virile masterfulness, all the more impressive
because of its extreme quiet assurance, had proved
even more deep than had at first appeared.

It is very hard to analyze the elements of a boy’s
adoration for a solid middle-aged gentleman with a
“personality”; yet the thing is an enormously
potent fact, and plays at least as big a part in the
sub-currents that run about the world as any more normal
human emotions. Psychologists of the materialistic
school would probably say that it was a survival of
the tribe-and-war instinct. At any rate, there
it is.

Added to all this was the peculiar relation in which
the medium stood to the boy; it was he who had first
opened the door towards that strange other world that
so persistently haunts the imaginations of certain
temperaments; it was through him that Laurie had had
brought before the evidence of his senses, as he thought,
the actuality of the things of which he had dreamed—­an
actuality which his religion had somehow succeeded
in evading. It was not that Laurie had been insincere
in his religion; there had been moments, and there
still were, occasionally, when the world that the
Catholic religion preached by word and symbol and
sacrament, became apparent; but the whole thing was
upon a different plane. Religion bade him approach
in one way, spiritualism in the other. The senses
had nothing to do with one; they were the only ultimate
channels of the other. And it is extraordinarily
easy for human beings to regard as more fundamentally
real the evidence of the senses than the evidence of
faith....

Here then were the two choices—­a world
of spirit, to be taken largely on trust, to be discerned
only in shadow and outline upon rare and unusual occasions
of exaltation, of a particular quality which had almost
lost its appeal; and a world of spirit that took shape
and form and practical intelligibility, in ordinary
rooms and under very nearly ordinary circumstances—­a
world, in short, not of a transcendent God and the
spirits of just men made perfect, of vast dogmas and
theories, but of a familiar atmosphere, impregnated
with experience, inhabited by known souls who in this
method or that made themselves apparent to those senses
which, Laurie believed, could not lie.... And
the point of contact was Amy Nugent herself....

Page 102

As regards his exact attitude to this girl it is more
difficult to write. On the one side the human
element—­those associations directly connected
with the senses—­her actual face and hands,
physical atmosphere and surroundings—­those
had disappeared; they were dispersed, or they lay
underground; and it had been with a certain shock
of surprise, in spite of the explanations given to
him, that he had seen what he believed to be her face
in the drawing-room in Queen’s Gate. But
he had tried to arrange all this in his imagination,
and it had fallen into shape and proportion again.
In short, he thought he understood now that it is
character which gives unity to the transient qualities
of a person on earth, and that, when those qualities
disappear, it is as unimportant as the wasting of
tissue: when, according to the spiritualists’
gospel that character manifests itself from the other
side, it naturally reconstitutes the form by which
it had been recognized on earth.

Yet, in spite of this sense of familiarity with what
he had seen, there had fallen between Amy and himself
that august shadow that is called Death.... And
in spite of the assurances he had received, even at
the hands of his own senses, that this was indeed the
same girl that he had known on earth, there was a
strange awe mingled with his old rather shallow passion.
There were moments, as he sat alone in his rooms at
night, when it rose almost to terror; just as there
were other moments when awe vanished for a while,
and his whole being was flooded with an extraordinary
ecstatic semi-earthly happiness at the thought that
he and she could yet speak with one another....
Imagine, if you please, a child who on returning home
finds that his mother has become Queen, and meets
her in the glory of ermine and diadem....

But the real deciding point—­which, somehow,
he knew must come—­the moment at which these
conflicting notes should become a chord, was fixed
for Sunday evening next. Up to now he had had
evidence of her presence, he had received intelligible
messages, though fragmentary and half stammered through
the mysterious veil, he had for an instant or two
looked upon her face; but the real point, he hoped,
would come in two days. The public seances
had not impressed him. He had been to three or
four of these in a certain road off Baker Street, and
had been astonished and disappointed. The kind
of people that he had met there—­sentimental
bourgeois with less power of sifting evidence than
the average child, with a credulity that was almost
supernatural—­the medium, a stout woman
who rolled her eyes and had damp fat fingers; the
hymn-singing, the wheezy harmonium, the amazing pseudo-mystical
oracular messages that revealed nothing which a religiose
fool could not invent—­in fact the whole
affair, from the sham stained-glass lamp-shade to
the ghostly tambourines overhead, the puerility of
the tricks played on the inquirers, and all the rest
of it—­this seemed as little connected with
what he had experienced with Mr. Vincent as a dervish
dance with High Mass. He had reflected with almost
ludicrous horror upon the impression it would make
on Maggie, and the remarks it would elicit.

Page 103

But this other engagement was a very different matter.

They were going to attempt a further advance.
It had, indeed, been explained to him that these attempts
were but tentative and experimental; it was impossible
to dictate exactly what should fall; but the object
on Sunday night was to go a step further, and to bring
about, if possible, the materialization process to
such a point that the figure could be handled, and
could speak. And it seemed to Laurie as if this
would be final indeed....

* * * *
*

So he sat this evening, within forty-eight hours of
the crisis, thinking steadily. Half a dozen times,
perhaps, the thought of Maggie recurred to him; but
he was learning how to get rid of that.

Then he took up the note and opened it. It was
filled with four pages of writing. He turned
to the end and read the signature. Then he turned
back and read the whole letter.

* * * *
*

It was very quiet as he sat there thinking over what
he had read. The noise of Fleet Street came up
here only as the soothing murmur of the sea upon a
beach; and he himself sat motionless, the firelight
falling upwards upon his young face, his eyes, and
his curly hair. About him stood his familiar
furniture, the grand piano a pool of glimmering dark
wood in the background, the tall curtained windows
suggestive of shelter and warmth and protection.

Yet, if he had but known it, he was making an enormous
choice. The letter was from the man he had met
at midday, and he was deciding how to answer it.
He was soothed and quieted by his loneliness, and his
irritation had disappeared: he regarded the letter
from a youthfully philosophical standpoint, pleased
with his moderation, as the work of a fanatic; he
was considering only whether he would yield, for politeness’
sake, to the importunity, or answer shortly and decisively.
It seemed to him remarkable that a mature and experienced
man could write such a letter.

At last he got up, went to his writing-table, and
sat down. Still he hesitated for a minute; then
he dipped his pen and wrote.

When he had finished and directed it, he went back
to the fire. He had an hour yet in which to think
and think before he need dress. He had promised
to dine with Mrs. Stapleton at half-past seven.
He had a touch of headache, and perhaps might sleep
it off.

Chapter XII

I

Lady Laura crossed the road by Knightsbridge Barracks
and turned again homewards through the Park.

It was one of those days that occasionally fall in
late February which almost cheer the beholder into
a belief that spring has really begun. Overhead
the sky was a clear pale blue, flecked with summer-looking
clouds, gauzy and white; beneath, the whole earth was
waking drowsily from a frost so slight as only to
emphasize the essential softness of the day that followed:
the crocuses were alight in the grass, and an indescribable
tint lay over all that had life, like the flush in
the face of an awakening child. But these days
are too good to last, and Lady Laura, who had looked
at the forecast of a Sunday paper, had determined
to take her exercise immediately after church.

Page 104

She had come out not long before from All Saints’;
she had listened to an excellent though unexciting
sermon and some extremely beautiful singing; and even
now, saturated with that atmosphere and with the soothing
physical air in which she walked, her anxieties seemed
less acute. There were enough of her acquaintances,
too, in groups here and there—­she had to
bow and smile sufficiently often—­to prevent
these anxieties from reasserting themselves too forcibly.
And it may be supposed that not a creature who observed
her, in her exceedingly graceful hat and mantle, with
her fair head a little on one side, and her gold-rimmed
pince-nez delicately gleaming in the sunlight, had
the very faintest suspicion that she had any anxieties
at all.

Yet she felt strangely unwilling even to go home.

The men were to set about clearing the drawing-room
while she was at church; and somehow the thought that
it would be done when she got home, that the temple
would, so to speak, be cleared for sacrifice, was
a distasteful one.

She did not quite know when the change had begun;
in fact, she was scarcely yet aware that there was
a change at all. Upon one point only her attention
fixed itself, and that was the increasing desire she
felt that Laurie Baxter should go no further in his
researches under her auspices.

Up to within a few weeks ago she had been all ardor.
It had seemed to her, as has been said, that the apparent
results of spiritualism were all to the good, that
they were in no point contrary to the religion she
happened to believe—­in fact, that they made
real, as does an actual tree in the foreground of
a panorama, the rather misty sky and hills of Christianity.
She had even called them very “teaching.”

It was about eighteen months since she had first taken
this up under the onslaught of Mrs. Stapleton’s
enthusiasm; but things had not been as satisfactory
as she wished, until Mr. Vincent had appeared.
Then indeed matters had moved forward; she had seen
extraordinary things, and the effect of them had been
doubled by the medium’s obvious honesty and
his strong personality. He was to her as a resolute
priest to a timid penitent; he had led her forward,
supported by his own conviction and his extremely
steady will, until she had begun to feel at home in
this amazing new world, and eager to make proselytes.

Then Laurie had appeared, and almost immediately a
dread had seized her that she could neither explain
nor understand. She had attempted a little tentative
conversation on the point with dearest Maud, but dearest
Maud had appeared so entirely incapable of understanding
her scruples that she had said no more. But her
inexplicable anxiety had already reached such a point
that she had determined to say a word to Laurie on
the subject. This had been done, without avail;
and now a new step forward was to be made.

* * * *
*

As to of what this step consisted she was perfectly
aware.

Page 105

The “controls,” she believed—­the
spirits that desired to communicate—­had
a series of graduated steps by which the communications
could be made, from mere incoherent noises (as a man
may rap a message from one room to another), through
appearances, also incoherent and intangible, right
up to the final point of assuming visible tangible
form, and of speaking in an audible voice. This
process, she believed, consisted first in a mere connection
between spirit and matter, and finally passed into
an actual assumption of matter, molded into the form
of the body once worn by the spirit on earth.
For nearly all of this process she had had the evidence
of her own senses; she had received messages, inexplicable
to her except on the hypothesis put forward, from
departed relations of her own; she had seen lights,
and faces, and even figures formed before her eyes,
in her own drawing-room; but she had not as yet, though
dearest Maud had been more fortunate, been able to
handle and grasp such figures, to satisfy the sense
of touch, as well as of sight, in proof of the reality
of the phenomenon.

Yes; she was satisfied even with what she had seen;
she had no manner of doubt as to the theories put
before her by Mr. Vincent; yet she shrank (and she
scarcely knew why) from that final consummation which
it was proposed to carry out if possible that evening.
But the shrinking centered round some half-discerned
danger to Laurie Baxter rather than to herself.

* * * *
*

It was these kinds of thoughts that beset her as she
walked up beneath the trees on her way homewards—­checked
and soothed now somewhat by the pleasant air and the
radiant sunlight, yet perceptible beneath everything.
And it was not only of Laurie Baxter that she thought;
she spared a little attention for herself.

For she had begun to be aware, for the first time
since her initiation, of a very faint distaste—­as
slight and yet as suggestive as that caused by a half-perceived
consciousness of a delicately disagreeable smell.
There comes such a moment in the life of cut flowers
in water, when the impetus of growing energy ceases,
and a new tone makes itself felt in their scent, of
which the end is certain. It is not sufficient
to cause the flowers to be thrown away; they still
possess volumes of fragrance; yet these decrease, and
the new scent increases, until it has the victory.

So it was now to the perceptions of this lady.
Oh! yes. Spiritualism was very “teaching”
and beautiful; it was perfectly compatible with orthodox
religion; it was undeniably true. She would not
dream of giving it up. Only it would be better
if Laurie Baxter did not meddle with it: he was
too sensitive.... However, he was coming that
evening again.... There was the fact.

* * * *
*

As she turned southwards at last, crossing the road
again towards her own street, it seemed to her that
the day even now was beginning to cloud over.
Over the roofs of Kensington a haze was beginning to
make itself visible, as impalpable as a skein of smoke;
yet there it was. She felt a little languid,
too. Perhaps she had walked too far. She
would rest a little after lunch, if dearest Maud did
not mind; for dearest Maud was to lunch with her,
as was usual on Sundays when the Colonel was away.

Page 106

As she came, slower than ever, down the broad opulent
pavement of Queen’s Gate, through the silence
and emptiness of Sunday—­for the church
bells were long ago silent—­she noticed coming
towards her, with a sauntering step, an old gentleman
in frock coat and silk hat of a slightly antique appearance,
spatted and gloved, carrying his hands behind his
back, as if he were waiting to be joined by some friend
from one of the houses. She noticed that he looked
at her through his glasses, but thought no more of
it till she turned up the steps of her own house.
Then she was startled by the sound of quick footsteps
and a voice.

“I beg your pardon, madam ...”

She turned, with her key in the door, and there he
stood, hat in hand.

“Have I the pleasure of speaking to Lady Laura
Bethell?”

There was a pleasant brisk ring about his voice that
inclined her rather favorably towards him.

“Is there anything.... Did you want to
speak to me...? Yes, I am Lady Laura Bethell.”

“I was told you were at church, madam, and that
you were not at home to visitors on Sunday.”

“That is quite right.... May I ask...?”

“Only a few minutes, Lady Laura, I promise you.
Will you forgive my persistence?”

Yes; the man was a gentleman; there was no doubt of
that.

“Would not tomorrow do? I am rather engaged
today.”

He had his card-case ready, and without answering
her at once, he came up the steps and handed it to
her.

The name meant nothing at all to her.

“Will not tomorrow...?” she began again.

“Tomorrow will be too late,” said the
old gentleman. “I beg of you, Lady Laura.
It is on an extremely important matter.”

She still hesitated an instant; then she pushed the
door open and went in.

“Please come in,” she said.

She was so taken aback by the sudden situation that
she forgot completely that the drawing-room would
be upside down, and led the way straight upstairs;
and it was not till she was actually within the door,
with the old gentleman close on her heels, that she
saw that, with the exception of three or four chairs
about the fire and the table set out near the hearthrug,
the room was empty of furniture.

“I forgot,” she said; “but will
you mind coming in here.... We ... we have a
meeting here this evening.”

She led the way to the fire, and at first did not
notice that he was not following her. When she
turned round she saw the old gentleman, with his air
of antique politeness completely vanished, standing
and looking about him with a very peculiar expression.
She also noticed, to her annoyance, that the cabinet
was already in place in the little ante-room and that
his eyes almost immediately rested upon it. Yet
there was no look of wonder in his face; rather it
was such a look as a man might have on visiting the
scene of a well-known crime—­interest, knowledge,
and loathing.

Page 107

“So it is here—­” he said in
quite a low voice.

Then he came across the room towards her.

II

For an instant his bearded face looked so strangely
at her that she half moved towards the bell.
Then he smiled, with a little reassuring gesture.

“No, no,” he said. “May I sit
down a moment?”

She began hastily to cover her confusion.

“It is a meeting,” she said, “for
this evening. I am sorry—­”

“Just so,” he said. “It is
about that that I have come.”

“I beg your pardon...?”

“Please sit down, Lady Laura.... May I
say in a sentence what I have come to say?”

This seemed a very odd old man.

“Why, yes—­” she said.

“I have come to beg you not to allow Mr. Baxter
to enter the house.... No, I have no authority
from anyone, least of all from Mr. Baxter. He
has no idea that I have come. He would think it
an unwarrantable piece of impertinence.”

“Mr. Cathcart ... I—­I cannot—­”

“Allow me,” he said, with a little compelling
gesture that silenced her. “I have been
asked to interfere by a couple of people very much
interested in Mr. Baxter; one of them, if not both,
completely disbelieves in spiritualism.”

“Then you know—­”

He waved his hand towards the cabinet.

“Of course I know,” he said. “Why,
I was a spiritualist for ten years myself. No,
not a medium; not a professional, that is to say.
I know all about Mr. Vincent; all about Mrs. Stapleton
and yourself, Lady Laura. I still follow the
news closely; I know perfectly well—­”

“And you have given it up?”

“I have given it up for a long while,”
he said quietly. “And I have come to ask
you to forbid Mr. Baxter to be present this evening,
for—­for the same reason for which I have
given it up myself.”

“Yes? And that—­”

“I don’t think we need go into that,”
he said. “It is enough, is it not, for
me to say that Mr. Baxter’s work, and, in fact,
his whole nervous system, is suffering considerably
from the excitement; that one of the persons who have
asked me to do what I can is Mr. Baxter’s own
law-coach: and that even if he had not asked me,
Mr. Baxter’s own appearance—­”

“You know him?”

“Practically, no. I lunched at the same
table with him on Friday; the symptoms are quite unmistakable.”

“I don’t understand. Symptoms?”

“Well, we will say symptoms of nervous excitement.
You are aware, no doubt, that he is exceptionally
sensitive. Probably you have seen for yourself—­”

“Wait a moment,” said Lady Laura, her
own heart beating furiously. “Why do you
not go to Mr. Baxter himself?”

“I have done so. I arranged to meet him
at lunch, and somehow I took a wrong turn with him:
I have no tact whatever, as you perceive. But
I wrote to him on Friday night, offering to call upon
him, and just giving him a hint. Well, it was
useless. He refused to see me.”

Page 108

“I don’t see what I—­”

“Oh yes,” chirped the old gentleman almost
gaily. “It would be quite unusual and unconventional.
I just ask you to send him a line—­I will
take it myself, if you wish it—­telling him
that you think it would be better for him not to come,
and saying that you are making other arrangements
for tonight.”

He looked at her with that odd little air of birdlike
briskness that she had noticed in the street; and
it pleasantly affected her even in the midst of the
uneasiness that now surged upon her again tenfold
more than before. She could see that there was
something else behind his manner; it had just looked
out in the glance he had given round the room on entering;
but she could not trouble at this moment to analyze
what it was. She was completely bewildered by
the strangeness of the encounter, and the extraordinary
coincidence of this man’s judgment with her
own. Yet there were a hundred reasons against
her taking his advice. What would the others
say? What of all the arrangements ... the expectation...?

“I don’t see how it’s possible now,”
she began. “I think I know what you mean.
But—­”

“Indeed, I trust you have no idea,” cried
the old gentleman, with a queer little falsetto note
coming into his voice—­“no idea at
all. I come to you merely on the plea of nervous
excitement; it is injuring his health, Lady Laura.”

She looked at him curiously.

“But—­” she began.

“Oh, I will go further,” he said.
“Have you never heard of—­of insanity
in connection with all this? We will call it insanity,
if you wish.”

For a moment her heart stood still. The word
had a sinister sound, in view of an incident she had
once witnessed; but it seemed to her that some meaning
behind, unknown to her, was still more sinister.
Why had he said that it might be “called insanity”
only...?

“Yes.... I—­I have once seen
a case,” she stammered.

“Well,” said the old gentleman, “is
it not enough when I tell you that I—­I
who was a spiritualist for ten years—­have
never seen a more dangerous subject than Mr. Baxter?
Is the risk worth it...? Lady Laura, do you quite
understand what you are doing?”

He leaned forward a little; and again she felt anxiety,
sickening and horrible, surge within her. Yet,
on the other hand....

The door opened suddenly, and Mr. Vincent came in.

III

There was silence for a moment; then the old gentleman
turned round, and in an instant was on his feet, quiet,
but with an air of bristling about his thrust-out
chin and his tense attitude.

Mr. Vincent paused, looking from one to the other.

“I beg your pardon, Lady Laura,” he said
courteously. “Your man told me to wait
here; I think he did not know you had come in.”

“Well—­er—­this gentleman...”
began Lady Laura. “Why, do you know Mr.
Vincent?” she asked suddenly, startled by the
expression in the old gentleman’s face.

Page 109

“I used to know Mr. Vincent,” he said
shortly.

“You have the advantage of me,” smiled
the medium, coming forward to the fire.

“My name is Cathcart, sir.”

The other started, almost imperceptibly.

“Ah! yes,” he said quietly. “We
did meet a few times, I remember.”

Lady Laura was conscious of distinct relief at the
interruption: it seemed to her a providential
escape from a troublesome decision.

“I think there is nothing more to be said, Mr.
Cathcart.... No, don’t go, Mr. Vincent.
We had finished our talk.”

“Lady Laura,” said the old gentleman with
a rather determined air, “I beg of you to give
me ten minutes more private conversation.”

She hesitated, clearly foreseeing trouble either way.
Then she decided.

“There is no necessity today,” she said.
“If you care to make an appointment for one
day next week, Mr. Cathcart—­”

“I am to understand that you refuse me a few
minutes now?”

“There is no necessity that I can see—­”

“Then I must say what I have to say before Mr.
Vincent—­”

“One moment, sir,” put in the medium,
with that sudden slight air of imperiousness that
Lady Laura knew very well by now. “If Lady
Laura consents to hear you, I must take it on myself
to see that nothing offensive is said.”
He glanced as if for leave towards the woman.

She made an effort.

“If you will say it quickly,” she began.
“Otherwise—­”

The old gentleman drew a breath as if to steady himself.
It was plain that he was very strongly moved beneath
his self-command: his air of cheerful geniality
was gone.

“I will say it in one sentence,” he said.
“It is this: You are ruining that boy between
you, body and soul; and you are responsible before
his Maker and yours. And if—­”

“Lady Laura,” said the medium, “do
you wish to hear any more?”

She made a doubtful little gesture of assent.

“And if you wish to know my reasons for saying
this,” went on Mr. Cathcart, “you have
only to ask for them from Mr. Vincent. He knows
well enough why I left spiritualism—­if he
dares to tell you.”

Lady Laura glanced at the medium. He was perfectly
still and quiet—­looking, watching the old
man curiously and half humorously under his heavy
eyebrows.

“And I understand,” went on the other,
“that tonight you are to make an attempt at
complete materialization. Very good; then after
tonight it may be too late. I have tried to appeal
to the boy: he will not hear me. And you
too have refused to hear me out. I could give
you evidence, if you wished. Ask this gentleman
how many cases he has known in the last five years,
where complete ruin, body and soul—­”

The medium turned a little to the fire, sighing as
if for weariness: and at the sound the old man
stopped, trembling. It was more obvious than
ever that he only held himself in restraint by a very
violent effort: it was as if the presence of
the medium affected him in an extraordinary degree.

Page 110

Lady Laura glanced again from one to the other.

“That is all, then?” she said.

His lips worked. Then he burst out—­

“I am sick of talking,” he cried—­“sick
of it! I have warned you. That is enough.
I cannot do more.”

He wheeled on his heel and went out. A minute
later the two heard the front door bang.

She looked at Mr. Vincent. He was twirling softly
in his strong fingers a little bronze candlestick
that stood on the mantelpiece: his manner was
completely unconcerned; he even seemed to be smiling
a little.

For herself she felt helpless. She had taken
her choice, impelled to it, though she scarcely recognized
the fact, by the entrance of this strong personality;
and now she needed reassurance once again. But
before she had a word to say, he spoke—­still
in his serene manner.

“Yes, yes,” he said. “I remember
now. I used to know Mr. Cathcart once. A
very violent old gentleman.”

“What did he mean?”

“His reasons for leaving us? Indeed I scarcely
remember. I suppose it was because he became
a Catholic.”

“Was there nothing more?”

He looked at her pleasantly.

“Why, I daresay there was. I really can’t
remember, Lady Laura. I suppose he had his nerves
shaken. You can see for yourself what a fanatic
he is.”

But in spite of his presence, once more a gust of
anxiety shook her.

“Mr. Vincent, are you sure it’s safe—­for
Mr. Baxter, I mean?”

“Safe? Why, he’s as safe as any of
us can be. We all have nervous systems, of course.”

“But he’s particularly sensitive, isn’t
he?”

“Indeed, yes. That is why even this evening
he must not go into trance. That must come later,
after a good training.”

She stood up, and came herself to stand by the mantelpiece.

“Then really there’s no danger?”

He turned straight to her, looking at her with kind,
smiling eyes.

“Lady Laura,” he said, “have I ever
yet told you that there was no danger? I think
not. There is always danger, for every one of
us, as there is for the scientist in the laboratory,
and the engineer in his machinery. But what we
can do is to reduce that danger to a minimum, so that,
humanly speaking, we are reasonably and sufficiently
safe. No doubt you remember the case of that
girl? Well, that was an accident: and accidents
will happen; but do me the justice to remember that
it was the first time that I had seen her. It
was absolutely impossible to foresee. She was
on the very edge of a nervous breakdown before she
entered the room. But with regard to Mr. Baxter,
I have seen him again and again; and I tell you that
I consider him to be running a certain risk—­but
a perfectly justifiable one, and one that is reduced
to a minimum, if I did not think that we were taking
every precaution, I would not have him in the room
for all the world.... Are you satisfied, Lady
Laura?”

Page 111

Every word he said helped her back to assurance.
It was all so reasonable and well weighed. If
he had said there was no danger, she would have feared
the more, but his very recognition of it gave her
security. And above all, his tranquility and his
strength were enormous assets on his side.

She drew a breath, and decided to go forward.

“And Mr. Cathcart?” she asked.

He smiled again.

“You can see what he is,” he said.
“I should advise you not to see him again.
It’s of no sort of use.”

Chapter XIII

I

The weather forecasts had been in the right; and the
few that struggled homewards that night from church
fought against a south-west wind that tore, laden
with driving rain, up the streets and across the open
spaces, till the very lights were dimmed in the tall
street lamps and shone only through streaming panes
that seemed half opaque with mist and vapor.
In Queen’s Gate hardly one lighted window showed
that the houses were inhabited. So fierce was
the clamor and storm of the broad street that men
made haste to shut out every glimpse of the night,
and the fanlights above the doors, or here and there
a line of brightness where some draught had tossed
the curtains apart, were the only signs of human life.
Outside the broad pavements stared like surfaces of
some canal, black and mirror-like, empty of passengers,
catching every spark or hint of light from house and
lamp, transforming it to a tall streak of glimmering
wetness.

The housekeeper’s room in this house on the
right was the more delightful from the contrast.
It was here that the august assembly was held every
evening after supper, set about with rigid etiquette
and ancient rite. Its windows looked on to the
little square garden at the back, but were now tight
shuttered and curtained; and the room was a very model
of comfort and warmth. Before the fire a square
table was drawn up, set out with pudding and fruit,
for it was here that the upper servants withdrew after
the cold meat and beer of the servants’ hall,
to be waited upon by the butler’s boy: and
it was round this that the four sat in state—­housekeeper,
butler, lady’s maid, and cook.

It was already after ten o’clock; and Mr. Parker
was permitted to smoke a small cigar. They had
discussed the weather, the sermon that Miss Baker
had heard in the morning, and the prospects of a Dissolution;
and they had once more returned to the mysteries that
were being enacted upstairs. They were getting
accustomed to them now, and there was not a great
deal to say, unless they repeated themselves, which
they had no objection to do. Their attitude was
one of tolerant skepticism, tempered by an agreeable
tendency on the part of Miss Baker to become agitated
after a certain point. Mr. Vincent, it was generally
conceded, was a respectable sort of man, with an air
about him that could hardly be put into words, and
it was thought to be a pity that he lent himself to
such superstition. Mrs. Stapleton had been long
ago dismissed as a silly sort of woman, though with
a will of her own; and her ladyship, of course, must
have her way; it could not last long, it was thought.

Page 112

But young Mr. Baxter was another matter, and there
was a deal to say about him. He was a gentleman—­that
was certain; and he seemed to have sense; but it was
a pity that he was so often here now on this business.
He had not said one word to Mr. Parker this evening
as he took off his coat; Mr. Parker had not thought
that he looked very well.

“He was too quiet-like,” said the butler.

As to the details of the affair upstairs—­these
were considered in a purely humorous light. It
was understood that tables danced a hornpipe, and
that tambourines were beaten by invisible hands; and
it was not necessary to go further into principles,
particularly since all these things were done by machinery
at the Egyptian Hall. Faces also, it was believed,
were seen looking out of the cabinet which Mr. Parker
had once more helped to erect this morning; but these,
it was explained, were “done” by luminous
paint. Finally, if people insisted on looking
into causes, Electricity was a sufficient answer for
all the rest. No one actually suggested water-power.

As for human motives, these were not called in question
at all. It appeared to amuse some people to do
this kind of thing, as others might collect old china
or practice the cotillion. There it was, a fact,
and there was no more to be said about it. Old
Lady Carraden, where Mr. Parker had once been under-butler,
had gone in for pouter pigeons; and Miss Baker had
heard tell of a nobleman who had a carpenter’s
shop of his own.

These things were so, then; and meantime here was
a cigar to be smoked by Mr. Parker, and a little weak
tea to be taken by the three ladies.

It was about a quarter-past ten when a reversion was
made to the weather. Within here all was supremely
comfortable. A black stuff mat, with a red fringed
border, lay before the blazing fire, convenient to
the feet; the heavy red curtains shut out the darkness,
and where the glass cases of china permitted it, large
photographs of wedding groups and the houses of the
nobility hung upon the walls. A King Charles’
spaniel, in another glass case, looked upon the company
with an eternal snarl belied by the mildness of his
brown eyes; and, corresponding to him on the other
side of the fire, a numerous family of humming-birds,
a little dusty and dim, poised perpetually above the
flowers of a lichened tree, with a flaming sunset to
show them up.

But, without, the wind tore unceasingly, laden with
rain, through the gusty darkness of the little garden,
and, in the pauses, the swift dripping from the roof
splashed and splashed upon the paved walk. It
was a very wild night, as Mr. Parker observed four
times: he only hoped that no one would require
a hansom cab. He had been foolish enough to take
the responsibility tonight of letting the guests out
himself, and of allowing William to go to bed when
he wished. And these were late affairs, seldom
over before eleven, and often not till nearly midnight.

Page 113

Mrs. Martin, in her blouse, moved a little nearer
the fire, and said she must be off soon to bed; Mrs.
Mayle, in her black silk, added that there was no
telling when her ladyship would get to bed, what with
Mrs. Stapleton and all, and commiserated Miss Baker;
Miss Baker moaned a little in self-pity; and Mr. Parker
remarked for the fifth time that it was a wild night.
It was an astonishingly serene and domestic atmosphere:
no effort of imagination or wit was required from
anybody; it was enough to make observations when they
occurred to the brain, and they would meet with a
tranquil response.

As half-past ten tinkled out from the little yellow
marble clock on the mantelpiece—­it had
been won by Mrs. Mayle’s deceased husband in
a horticultural exhibition—­Mrs. Martin
said that she must go and have a look at the scullery
to see that all was as it should be; there was no
knowing with these girls nowadays what they might not
leave undone; and Mrs. Mayle preened herself gently
with the thought that her responsibilities were on
a higher plane. Mr. Parker made a courteous movement
as if to rise, and remained seated, as the cook rustled
out. Miss Baker sighed again as she contemplated
the long conversation that might take place between
the two ladies upstairs before she could get her mistress
to bed.

Once more the tranquil atmosphere settled down on
the warm room; the brass lamp burned brightly with
a faint and reassuring smell of paraffin; the fire
presented a radiant cavern of red coals fringed by
dancing flames; and Mr. Parker leaned forwards to shake
off the ash of his cigar.

Then, on a sudden, he paused, for from the passage
outside came the passionless tinkle of an electric
bell—­then another, and another, and another,
as if some person overhead strove by reiteration on
that single note to cry out some overwhelming need.

II

Overhead in the great empty drawing-room the noise
of the wind and rain, the almost continuous spatter
on the glass, and the long hooting of the gusts, had
been far more noticeable than in the basement beneath.
Below stairs the company had been natural and normal,
talking of this and that, in a brightly lighted room,
dwelling only on matters that fell beneath the range
of their senses, lulled by warmth and food and cigar-smoke
into a kind of rapt self-contemplation. But up
here, in the gloom, lighted only on this occasion
by a single shaded candle, in a complete interior
silence, three persons had sat round a table for more
than an hour, striving by passivity and a kind of
indescribable concentration to ignore all that was
presented by the senses, and to await some movement
from that which lies beyond them.

Lady Laura had sat down that night in a state of mind
which she could not analyze. It was not that
her anxieties had been lulled so much as counterbalanced;
they were still there, at once poignant and heavy,
but on the other side there had been the assured air
of the medium, his reasonableness and his personality,
as well as the enthusiasm of her friend, and her astonished
remonstrances. She had decided to acquiesce,
not because she was satisfied, but because on the whole
anxiety was outweighed by confidence. She could
not have taken action under such circumstances, but
she could at least refrain from it.

Page 114

Laurie, as Mr. Parker had noticed, had been “quiet-like”;
he had said very little indeed, but a nervous strain
was evident in the brightness of his eyes; but in
answer to a conventional inquiry he had declared himself
extremely well. Mr. Vincent had looked at him
for just an instant longer than usual as he shook
hands, but he said nothing. Mrs. Stapleton had
made an ecstatic remark or two on the envy with which
she regarded the boy’s sensitive faculties.

At the beginning of the seance the medium had
repeated his warnings as to Laurie’s avoiding
of trance, and had added one or two other precautions.
Then he had gone into the cabinet; the fire had been
pressed down under ashes, and a single candle lighted
and placed behind the angle of the little adjoining
room in such a position that its shaded light fell
upon the cabinet only and the figure of the medium
within.

* * * *
*

When the silence became fixed, Lady Laura for the
first time perceived the rage of wind and rain outside.
The very intensity of the interior stillness and the
rapture of attention emphasized to an extraordinary
degree the windy roar without. Yet the silence
seemed to her, now as always, to have a peculiar faculty
of detaching the psychical from the physical atmosphere.
In spite of the batter of rain not ten feet away,
the sighing between the shutters, and even the lift
now and again of the heavy curtains in the draught,
she seemed to herself as remote from it as does a
man crouching in the dark under some ruin feel himself
at an almost infinite distance from the pick and the
hammer of the rescuers. These were in one world,
she in another.

For over an hour no movement was made. She herself
sat facing the fire, Laurie on her left looking towards
the cabinet with his back to the windows, Mrs. Stapleton
opposite to her.

An endless procession of thoughts defiled before her
as she sat, yet these too were somewhat remote—­far
up, so to speak, on the superficies of consciousness:
they did not approach that realm of the will poised
now and attentive on another range of existence.
Once and again she glanced up without moving her head
at the three-quarter profile on her left, at the somewhat
Zulu-like outline opposite to her; then down again
at the polished little round table and the six hands
laid upon it. And meanwhile her brain revolved
images rather than thoughts, memories rather than
reflections—­vignettes, so to speak,—­old
Mr. Cathcart in his spats and frock-coat, the look
on the medium’s face, there and gone again in
an instant as he had heard the stranger’s name;
the carved oak stalls of the chancel towards which
she had faced this morning, the look of the park, the
bloom upon the still leafless trees, the radiance
of the blue spring sky....

Page 115

It must have been, she thought, after a little over
an hour that the first expected movement made itself
felt—­a long trembling shudder through the
wood beneath her hands, followed by a strange sensation
of lightness, as if the whole table rose a little
from the floor. Then, almost before the movement
subsided, a torrent of little taps poured itself out,
as delicate and as swift and, it seemed, as perfectly
calculated, as the rapping of some minute electric
hammer. This was new to her, yet not so unlike
other experiences as to seem strange or perturbing
in any way.... Again she bent her attention to
the table as the vibration ceased.

There followed a long silence.

It must have been about ten minutes later that she
became aware of the next phenomenon; and her attention
had been called to it by a sudden noiseless uplifting
of the profile on her left. She turned her face
to the cabinet and looked; and there, perfectly discernible,
was some movement going on between the curtains.
For the moment she could see the medium clearly, his
arms folded, indicated by the white lines of his cuffs
across his breast, his head sunk forward in deep sleep;
and at the next instant the curtains flapped two or
three times, as if jerked from within, and finally
rested completely closed.

She glanced quickly at the boy on her left, and in
the diffused light from the other room could see him
distinctly, his eyes open and watching, his lips compressed
as if in some tense effort of self-control.

When she looked at the cabinet again she could see
that some movement had begun again behind the curtains,
for these swayed and jerked convulsively, as if some
person with but little room was moving there.
And she could hear now, as the gusts outside lulled
for a moment, the steady rather stertorous breathing
of the medium. Then once again the wind gathered
strength outside; the rain tore at the glass like a
streaming handful of tiny pebbles, and the great curtains
at her side lifted and sighed in the draught through
the shutters.

When it quieted again the breathing had become a measured
moaning, as that which a dreaming dog emits at the
end of each expiration; and she herself drew a long
trembling breath, overwhelmed by the sense of some
struggle in the room such as she had not experienced
before.

It was impossible for her to express this even to
herself; yet the perception was clear—­as
clear as some presentment of the senses. She
knew during those moments, as she watched the swaying
curtains of the cabinet in the shaded light that fell
upon them, and heard now and again that low moan from
behind them, that some kind of stress lay upon something
that was new to her in this connection. For the
time she forgot her undertone of anxiety as to this
boy at her side, and a curious terrified excitement
took its place. Once, even then, she glanced
at him again, and saw the motionless profile watching,
always watching....

Page 116

Then in an instant the climax came, and this is what
she saw.

* * * *
*

The commotion of the curtains ceased suddenly, and
they hung in straight folds from roof to floor of
the little cabinet. Then they gently parted—­she
saw the long fingers that laid hold of them—­and
the form of a person came out, descended the single
step, and stood on the floor before her eyes, in the
plain candlelight, not four steps away.

It was the figure of a young girl, perfectly formed
in all its parts, swathed in some light stuff resembling
muslin that fell almost to the feet and shrouded the
upper part of the head. Her hands were clasped
across her breast, her bare feet were visible against
the dark floor, and her features were unmistakably
clear. There was a certain beauty in the face—­in
the young lips, the open eyes, and the dark lines of
the brows over them; and the complexion was waxen,
clear as of a blonde. But, as the observer had
noticed before on the three or four occasions on which
she had seen these phenomena, there was a strange
mask-like set of the features, as if the life that
lay behind them had not perfectly saturated that which
expressed it. It was something utterly different
from the face of a dead person, yet also not completely
alive, though the eyes turned a little in their sockets,
and the young down-curved lips smiled. Behind
her, plain between the tossed-back curtains, was the
figure of the medium sunk in sleep.

And so for a few seconds the apparition remained.

It seemed to the watcher that during those seconds
the whole world was still. Whether in truth the
wind had dropped, or whether the absorbed attention
perceived nothing but the marvel before it, yet so
it seemed. Even the breathing of the medium had
stopped; Lady Laura heard only the ticking of the
watch upon her own wrist.

Then, as once more a gust tore up from the south-west,
the figure moved forward a step nearer the table,
coming with a motion as of a living person, causing,
it even appeared, that faint vibration on the floor
as of a living body.

She stood so near now, though with her back to the
diffused light of the ante-room, that her features
were more plain than before—­the stained
lips, the open eyes, the shadow beneath the nostrils
and chin, even the white fingers clasped across the
breast. There was none of that vague mistiness
that had been seen once before in that room; every
line was as clear-cut as in the face of a living person;
even the swell of the breast beneath the hands, the
slender sloping shoulders, the long curved line from
hip to ankle, all were real and discernible.
And once again the staring eyes of the watcher took
in, and her mind perceived, that slight mask-like
look on the pretty appealing face.

Once again the figure came forward, straight on to
the table; and then, so swift that not a motion or
a word could check it, the catastrophe fell.

Page 117

There was a violent movement on Lady Laura’s
left hand, a chair shot back and fell, and with a
horrible tearing cry from the throat, the boy dashed
himself face forwards across the table, snatched at
and for an instant seized something real and concrete
that stood there; and as the two women sprang up,
losing sight for an instant of the figure that had
been there a moment ago, the boy sank forward, moaning
and sobbing, and a crash as of a heavy body falling
sounded from the cabinet.

For a space of reckonable time there was complete
silence. Then once more a blast of wind tore
up from the south-west, rain shattered against the
window, and the house vibrated to the shock.

Chapter XIV

I

As the date approached Maggie felt her anxieties settle
down, like a fire, from turbulence to steady flame.
On the Sunday she had with real difficulty kept it
to herself, and the fringe of the storm of wind and
rain that broke over Herefordshire in the evening had
not been reassuring. Yet on one thing her will
kept steady hold, and that was that Mrs. Baxter must
not be consulted. No conceivable good could result,
and there might even be harm: either the old lady
would be too much or not enough concerned: she
might insist on Laurie’s return to Stantons,
or might write him a cheering letter encouraging him
to amuse himself in any direction that he pleased.
So Maggie passed the evening in fits of alternate
silence and small conversation, and succeeded in making
Mrs. Baxter recommend a good long night.

Monday morning, however, broke with a cloudless sky,
an air like wine, and the chatter of birds; and by
the time that Maggie went to look at the crocuses
immediately before breakfast, she was all but at her
ease again. Enough, however, of anxiety remained
to make her hurry out to the stable-yard when she
heard the postman on his way to the back door.

There was one letter for her, in Mr. Cathcart’s
handwriting; and she opened it rather hastily as she
turned in again to the garden.

It was reassuring. It stated that the writer
had approached—­that was the word—­Mr.
Baxter, though unfortunately with ill-success, and
that he proposed on the following day—­the
letter was dated on Saturday evening—­also
to approach Lady Laura Bethell. He felt fairly
confident, he said, that his efforts would succeed
in postponing, at any rate, Mr. Baxter’s visit
to Lady Laura; and in that case he would write further
as to what was best to be done. In the meanwhile
Miss Deronnais was not to be in the least anxious.
Whatever happened, it was extremely improbable that
one visit more or less to a seance would carry
any great harm: it was the habit, rather than
the act, that was usually harmful to the nervous system.
And the writer begged to remain her obedient servant.

Maggie’s spirits rose with a bound. How
extraordinarily foolish she had been, she told herself,
to have been filled with such forebodings last night!
It was more than likely that the seance had
taken place without Laurie; and, even at the worst,
as Mr. Cathcart said, he was probably only a little
more excited than usual this morning.

Page 118

So she began to think about future arrangements; and
by the time that Mrs. Baxter looked benignantly out
at her from beneath the Queen Anne doorway to tell
her that breakfast was waiting, she was conceiving
of the possibility of going up herself to London in
a week or two on some shopping excuse, and of making
one more genial attempt to persuade Laurie to be a
sensible boy again.

During her visit to the fowl-yard after breakfast
she began to elaborate these plans.

She was clear now, once again, that the whole thing
was a fantastic delusion, and that its sole harm was
that it was superstitious and nerve-shaking. (She
threw a large handful of maize, with a meditative
eye.) It was on that ground and that only that she
would approach Laurie. Perhaps even it would
be better for her not to go and see him; it might
appear that she was making too much of it: a good
sensible letter might do the work equally well....
Well, she would wait at least to hear from Mr. Cathcart
once more. The second post would probably bring
a letter from him. (She emptied her bowl.)

She was out again in the spring sunshine, walking
up and down before the house with a book, by the time
that the second post was due. But this time,
through the iron gate, she saw the postman go past
the house without stopping. Once more her spirits
rose, this time, one might say, to par; and she went
indoors.

Her window looked out on to the front; and she moved
her writing-table to it to catch as much as possible
of the radiant air and light of the spring day.
She proposed to begin to sketch out what she would
say to Laurie, and suggest, if he wished it, to come
up and see him in a week or two. She would apologize
for her fussiness, and say that the reason why she
was writing was that she did not want his mother to
be made anxious.

“My dear Laurie...”

She bit her pen gently, and looked out of the window
to catch inspiration for the particular frame of words
with which she should begin. And as she looked
an old gentleman suddenly appeared beyond the iron
gate, shook it gently, glanced up in vain for a name
on the stone posts, and stood irresolute. It
was an old trap, that of the front gate; there was
no bell, and it was necessary for visitors to come
straight in to the front door.

Then, so swiftly that she could not formulate it,
an anxiety leapt at her, and she laid her pen down,
staring. Who was this?

She went quickly to the bell and rang it; standing
there waiting, with beating heart and face suddenly
gone white....

“Susan,” she said, “there is an
old gentleman at the gate. Go out and see who
it is.... Stop: if it is anyone for me ...
if—­if he gives the name of Mr. Cathcart,
ask him to be so kind as to go round the turn to the
village and wait for me.... Susan, don’t
say anything to Mrs. Baxter; it may just possibly
be bad news.”

From behind the curtain she watched the maid go down
the path, saw a few words pass between her and the
stranger, and then the maid come back. She waited
breathless.

Page 119

“Yes, miss. It is a Mr. Cathcart.
He said he would wait for you.”

Maggie nodded.

“I will go,” she said. “Remember,
please do not say a word to anyone. It may be
bad news, as I said.”

* * * *
*

As she walked through the hamlet three minutes later,
she began to recognize that the news must be really
serious; and that beneath all her serenity she had
been aware of its possibility. So intense now
was that anxiety—­though perfectly formless
in its details—­that all other faculties
seemed absorbed into it. She could not frame any
imagination as to what it meant; she could form no
plan, alternative or absolute, as to what must be
done. She was only aware that something had happened,
and that she would know the facts in a few seconds.

About fifty yards up the turning she saw the old gentleman
waiting. He was in his London clothes, silk-hatted
and spatted, and made a curiously incongruous picture
there in the deep-banked lane that led upwards to
the village. On either side towered the trees,
still leafless, yet bursting with life; and overhead
chattered the birds against the tender midday sky
of spring.

He lifted his hat as she came to him; but they spoke
no word of greeting.

“Tell me quickly,” she said. “I
am Maggie Deronnais.”

He turned to walk by her side, saying nothing for
a moment.

“The facts or the interpretation?” he
asked in his brisk manner. “I will just
say first that I have seen him this morning.”

“Oh! the facts,” she said. “Quickly,
please.”

“Well, he is going to Mr. Morton’s chambers
this afternoon; he says...”

“What?”

“One moment, please.... Oh! he is not seriously
ill, as the world counts illness. He thought
he was just very tired this morning. I went round
to call on him. He was in bed at half-past ten
when I left him. Then I came straight down here.”

For a moment she thought the old man mad. The
relief was so intense that she flushed scarlet, and
stopped dead in the middle of the road.

“You came down here,” she repeated.
“Why, I thought—­”

He looked at her gravely, in spite of the incessant
twinkle in his eyes. She perceived that this
old man’s eyes would twinkle at a death-bed.
He stroked his grey beard smoothly down.

“Yes; you thought that he was dead, perhaps?
Oh, no. But for all that, Miss Deronnais, it
is just as serious as it can be.”

She did not know what to think. Was the man a
madman himself?

“Listen, please. I am telling you simply
the facts. I was anxious, and I went round this
morning first to Lady Laura Bethell. To my astonishment
she saw me. I will not tell you all that she said,
just now. She was in a terrible state, though
she did not know one-tenth of the harm—­Well,
after what she told me I went round straight to Mitre
Court. The porter was inclined not to let me in.
Well, I went in, and straight into Mr. Baxter’s
bedroom; and I found there—­”

Page 120

He stopped.

“Yes?”

“I found exactly what I had feared, and expected.”

“Oh! tell me quickly,” she cried, wheeling
on him in anger.

He looked at her as if critically for a moment.
Then he went on abruptly.

“I found Mr. Baxter in bed. I made no apology
at all. I said simply that I had come to see
how he was after the seance.”

“It took place, then—­”

“Oh! yes.... I forgot to mention that Lady
Laura would pay no attention to me yesterday....
Yes, it took place.... Well, Mr. Baxter did not
seem surprised to see me. He told me he felt tired.
He said that the seance had been a success.
And while he talked I watched him. Then I came
away and caught the ten-fifty.”

“I don’t understand in the least,”
said Maggie.

“So I suppose,” said the other dryly.
“I imagine you do not believe in spiritualism
at all—­I mean that you think that the whole
thing is fraud or hysteria?”

“Yes, I do,” said Maggie bravely.

He nodded once or twice.

“So do most sensible people. Well, Miss
Deronnais, I have come to warn you. I did not
write, because it was impossible to know what to say
until I had seen you and heard your answer to that
question. At the same time, I wanted to lose
no time. Anything may happen now at any moment....
I wanted to tell you this: that I am at your service
now altogether. When—­” he stopped;
then he began again, “If you hear no further
news for the present, may I ask when you expect to
see Mr. Baxter again?”

“In Easter week.”

“That is a fortnight off.... Do you think
you could persuade him to come down here next week
instead? I should like you to see him for yourself:
or even sooner.”

She was still hopelessly confused with these apparent
alternations. She still wondered whether Mr.
Cathcart were as mad as he seemed. They turned,
as the village came in sight ahead, up the hill.

“Next week? I could try,” she said
mechanically. “But I don’t understand—­”

He held up a gloved hand.

“Wait till you have seen him,” he said.
“For myself, I shall make a point of seeing
Mr. Morton every day to hear the news.... Miss
Deronnais, I tell you plainly that you alone will have
to bear the weight of all this, unless Mrs. Baxter—­”

“Oh, do explain,” she said almost irritably.

He looked at her with those irresistibly twinkling
eyes, but she perceived a very steady will behind
them.

“I will explain nothing at all,” he said,
“now that I have seen you, and heard what you
think, except this single point. What you have
to be prepared for is the news that Mr. Baxter has
suddenly gone out of his mind.”

It was said in exactly the same tone as his previous
sentences, and for a moment she did not catch the
full weight of its meaning. She stopped and looked
at him, paling gradually.

Page 121

“Yes, you took that very well,” he said,
still meeting her eyes steadily. “Stop....
Keep a strong hold on yourself. That is the worst
you have to hear, for the present. Now tell me
immediately whether you think Mrs. Baxter should be
informed or not.”

Her leaping heart slowed down into three or four gulping
blows at the base of her throat. She swallowed
with difficulty.

“How do you know—­”

“Kindly answer my question,” he said.
“Do you think Mrs. Baxter—­”

“Oh, God! Oh, God!” sobbed Maggie.

“Steady, steady,” said the old man.
“Take my arm, Miss Deronnais.”

She shook her head, keeping her eyes fixed on his.

He smiled in his grey beard.

“Very good,” he said, “very good.
And do you think—­”

She shook her head again.

“No: not one word. She is his mother.
Besides—­she is not the kind—­she
would be of no use.”

“Yes: it is as I thought. Very well,
Miss Deronnais; you will have to be responsible.
You can wire for me at any moment. You have my
address?”

She nodded.

“Then I have one or two things to add.
Whatever happens, do not lose heart for one moment.
I have seen these cases again and again.... Whatever
happens, too, do not put yourself into a doctor’s
hands until I have seen Mr. Baxter for myself.
The thing may come suddenly or gradually. And
the very instant you are convinced it is coming, telegraph
to me. I will be here two hours after....
Do you understand?”

They halted twenty yards from the turning into the
hamlet. He looked at her again with his kindly
humorous eyes.

She nodded slowly and deliberately, repeating in her
own mind his instructions; and beneath, like a whirl
of waters, questions surged to and fro, clamoring
for answer. But her self-control was coming back
each instant.

“You understand, Miss Deronnais?” he said
again.

“I understand. Will you write to me?”

“I will write this evening.... Once more,
then. Get him down next week. Watch him
carefully when he comes. Consult no doctor until
you have telegraphed to me, and I have seen him.”

He took her hand for a moment. Then he raised
his hat and left her standing there.

II

Mrs. Baxter was exceedingly absorbed just now in a
new pious book of meditations written by a clergyman.
A nicely bound copy of it, which she had ordered specially,
had arrived by the parcels post that morning; and
she had been sitting in the drawing-room ever since
looking through it, and marking it with a small silver
pencil. Religion was to this lady what horticulture
was to Maggie, except of course that it was really
important, while horticulture was not. She often
wondered that Maggie did not seem to understand:
of course she went to mass every morning, dear girl;
but religion surely was much more than that; one should
be able to sit for two or three hours over a book
in the drawing-room, before the fire, with a silver
pencil.

Page 122

So at lunch she prattled of the book almost continuously,
and at the end of it thought Maggie more unsubtle
than ever: she looked rather tired and strained,
thought the old lady, and she hardly said a word from
beginning to end.

The drive in the afternoon was equally unsatisfactory.
Mrs. Baxter took the book with her, and the pencil,
in order to read aloud a few extracts here and there;
and she again seemed to find Maggie rather vacuous
and silent.

“Dearest child, you are not very well, I think,”
she said at last.

Maggie roused herself suddenly.

“What, Auntie?”

“You are not very well, I think. Did you
sleep well?”

“Oh! I slept all right,” said Maggie
vaguely.

* * * *
*

But after tea Mrs. Baxter did not feel very well herself.
She said she thought she must have taken a little
chill. Maggie looked at her with unperceptive
eyes.

“I am sorry,” she said mechanically.

“Dearest, you don’t seem very overwhelmed.
I think perhaps I shall have dinner in bed. Give
me my book, child.... Yes, and the pencil-case.”

Mrs. Baxter’s room was so comfortable, and the
book so fascinatingly spiritual, that she determined
to keep her resolution and go to bed. She felt
feverish, just to the extent of being very sleepy and
at her ease. She rang her bell and issued her
commands.

“A little of the volaille,” she
said, “with a spoonful of soup before it....
No, no meat; but a custard or so, and a little fruit.
Oh! yes, Charlotte, and tell Miss Maggie not to come
and see me after dinner.”

It seemed that the message had roused the dear girl
at last, for Maggie appeared ten minutes later in
quite a different mood. There was really some
animation in her face.

“Dear Auntie, I am so very sorry.... Yes;
do go to bed, and breakfast there in the morning too.
I’m just writing to Laurie, by the way.”

Mrs. Baxter nodded sleepily from her deep chair.

“He’s coming down in Easter week, isn’t
he?”

“So he says, my dear.”

“Why shouldn’t he come next week instead,
Auntie, and be with us for Easter? You’d
like that, wouldn’t you?”

“Very nice indeed, dear child; but don’t
bother the boy.”

“And you don’t think it’s influenza?”
put in Maggie swiftly, laying a cool hand on the old
lady’s.

She maintained it was not. It was just a little
chill, such as she had had this time last year:
and it became necessary to rouse herself a little
to enumerate the symptoms. By the time she had
done, Maggie’s attention had begun to wander
again: the old lady had never known her so unsympathetic
before, and said so with gentle peevishness.

Maggie kissed her quickly.

“I’m sorry, Auntie,” she said.
“I was just thinking of something. Sleep
well; and don’t get up in the morning.”

Then she left her to a spoonful of soup, a little
volaille, a custard, some fruit, her spiritual
book and contentment.

Page 123

Downstairs she dined alone in the green-hung dining-room;
and she revolved for the twentieth time the thoughts
that had been continuously with her since midday,
moving before her like a kaleidoscope, incessantly
changing their relations, their shapes, and their
suggestions. These tended to form themselves into
two main alternative classes. Either Mr. Cathcart
was a harmless fanatic, or he was unusually sharp.
But these again had almost endless subdivisions, for
at present she had no idea of what was really in his
mind—­as to what his hints meant. Either
this curious old gentleman with shrewd, humorous eyes
was entirely wrong, and Laurie was just suffering from
a nervous strain, not severe enough to hinder him
from reading law in Mr. Morton’s chambers; and
this was all the substratum of Mr. Cathcart’s
mysteries: or else Mr. Cathcart was right, and
Laurie was in the presence of some danger called insanity
which Mr. Cathcart interpreted in some strange fashion
she could not understand. And beneath all this
again moved the further questions as to what spiritualism
really was—­what it professed to be, or mere
superstitious nonsense, or something else.

She was amazed that she had not demanded greater explicitness
this morning; but the thing had been so startling,
so suggestive at first, so insignificant in its substance,
that her ordinary common sense had deserted her.
The old gentleman had come and gone like a wraith,
had uttered a few inconclusive sentences, and promised
to write, had been disappointed with her at one moment
and enthusiastic the next. Obviously their planes
ran neither parallel nor opposing; they cut at unexpected
points; and Maggie had no notion as to the direction
in which his lay. All she saw plainly was that
there was some point of view other than hers.

So, then, she revolved theories, questioned, argued,
doubted with herself. One thing only emerged—­the
old lady’s feverish cold afforded her exactly
the opportunity she wished; she could write to Laurie
with perfect truthfulness that his mother had taken
to her bed, and that she hoped he would come down
next week instead of the week after.

After dinner she sat down and wrote it, pausing many
times to consider a phrase.

Then she read a little, and soon after ten went upstairs
to bed.

III

It was a little before sunset on that day that Mr.
James Morton turned down on to the Embankment to walk
up to the Westminster underground to take him home.
He was a great man on physical exercise, and it was
a matter of principle with him to live far from his
work. As he came down the little passage he found
his friend waiting for him, and together they turned
up towards where in the distance the Westminster towers
rose high and blue against the evening sky.

“Well?” said the old man.

Mr. Morton looked at him with a humorous eye.

“You are a hopeless case,” he said.

Page 124

“Kindly tell me what you noticed.”

“My dear man,” he said, “there’s
absolutely nothing to say. I did exactly what
you said: I hardly spoke to him at all: I
watched him very carefully indeed. I really can’t
go on doing that day after day. I’ve got
my own work to do. It’s the most utter bunkum
I ever—­”

“Tell me anything odd that you saw.”

“There was nothing odd at all, except that the
boy looked tired, as you saw for yourself this morning.”

“Did he behave exactly as usual?”

“Exactly, except that he was quieter. He
fidgeted a little with his fingers.”

“Yes?”

“And he seemed very hard at work. I caught
him looking at me once or twice.”

The other held up a gloved hand in deprecation; but
he did not seem at all ruffled.

“Yes, yes; we can take all that as said....
I’m accustomed to it, my dear fellow. Well,
I saw Miss Deronnais, as I told you I should in my
note.... You’re quite right about her.”

“Pleased to hear it, I’m sure,”
said Mr. Morton solemnly.

“She’s one in a thousand. I told
her right out, you know, that I feared insanity.”

“Oh! you did! That’s tactful!
How did she—­”

“She took it admirably.”

“And did you tell her your delightful theories?”

“I did not. She will see all that for herself,
I expect. Meantime—­”

“Oh, you didn’t tell me about your interview
with Lady Laura.”

The old face grew a little grim.

“Ah! that’s not finished yet,” he
said. “I’m on my way to her now.
I don’t think she’ll play with the thing
again just yet.”

“And the others—­the medium, and so
on?”

“They will have to take their chance. It’s
absolutely useless going to them.”

“They’re as bad as I am, I expect.”

The old man turned a sharp face to him.

“Oh! you know nothing whatever about it,”
he said. “You don’t count. But
they do know quite enough.”

Page 125

In the underground the two talked no more; but Mr.
Morton, affecting to read his paper, glanced up once
or twice at the old shrewd face opposite that stared
so steadily out of the window into the roaring darkness.
And once more he reflected how astonishing it was that
anyone in these days—­anyone, at least, possessing
common sense—­and common sense was written
all over that old bearded face—­could believe
such fantastic rubbish as that which had been lately
discussed. It was not only the particular points
that regarded Laurie Baxter—­all these absurd,
though disquieting hints about insanity and suicide
and the rest of it—­but the principles that
old Cathcart declared to be beneath—­those
principles which he had, apparently, not confided to
Miss Deronnais. Here was the twentieth century;
here was an electric railway, padded seats, and the
Pall Mall...! Was further comment required?

The train began to slow up at Gloucester Road; and
old Cathcart gathered up his umbrella and gloves.

“Then tomorrow,” he said, “at the
same time?”

Mr. Morton made a resigned gesture.

“But why don’t you go and have it out
with him yourself?” he asked.

“He would not listen to me—­less than
ever now. Good night!”

* * * *
*

The train slid on again into the darkness; and the
lawyer sat for a moment with pursed lips. Yes,
of course the boy was overwrought: anyone could
see that: he had stammered a little—­a
sure sign. But why make all this fuss? A
week in the country would set him right.

Then he opened the Pall Mall again resolutely.

Chapter XV

I

Mr. and Mrs. Nugent were enjoying their holiday exceedingly.
On Good Friday they had driven laboriously in a waggonette
to Royston, where they had visited the hermit’s
cave in company with other grandees of their village,
and held a stately picnic on the downs. They had
returned, the gentlemen of the party slightly flushed
with brandy and water from the various hostelries
on the home journey, and the ladies severe, with watercress
on their laps. Accordingly, on the Saturday,
Mrs. Nugent had thought it better to stay indoors and
dispatch her husband to the scene of the first cricket
match of the season, a couple of miles away.

At about five o’clock she made herself a cup
of tea, and did not wake up from the sleep which followed
until the evening was closing in. She awoke with
a start, remembering that she had intended to give
a good look between the spare bedroom that had been
her daughter’s, and possibly make a change or
two of the furniture. There was a mahogany wardrobe
... and so forth.

She had not entered this room very often since the
death. It had come to resemble to her mind a
sort of melancholy sanctuary, symbolical of glories
that might have been; for she and her husband were
full of the glorious day that had begun to dawn when
Laurie, very constrained though very ardent, had called
upon them in state to disclose his intentions.
Well, it had been a false dawn; but at least it could
be, and was, still talked about in sad and suggestive
whispers.

Page 126

It seemed full then of a mysterious splendor when
she entered it this evening, candle in hand, and stood
regarding it from the threshold. To the outward
eye it was nothing very startling. A shrouded
bed protruded from the wall opposite with the words
“The Lord preserve thee from all evil”
illuminated in pink and gold by the girl’s own
hand. An oleograph of Queen Victoria in coronation
robes hung on one side and the painted photograph
of a Nonconformist divine, Bible in hand, whiskered
and cravatted, upon the other. There was a small
cloth-covered table at the foot of the bed, adorned
with an almost continuous line of brass-headed nails
as a kind of beading round the edge, in the center
of which rested the plaster image of a young person
clasping a cross. A hymn-book and a Bible stood
before this, and a small jar of wilted flowers.
Against the opposite wall, flanked by dejected-looking
wedding-groups, and another text or two, stood the
great mahogany wardrobe, whose removal was vaguely
in contemplation.

Mrs. Nugent regarded the whole with a tender kind
of severity, shaking her head slowly from side to
side, with the tin candlestick slightly tilted.
She was a full-bodied lady, in clothes rather too tight
for her, and she panted a little after the ascent
of the stairs. It seemed to her once more a strangely
and inexplicably perverse act of Providence, to whom
she had always paid deference, by which so incalculable
a rise in the social scale had been denied to her.

Then she advanced a step, her eyes straying from the
shrouded bed to the wardrobe and back again.
Then she set the candlestick upon the table and turned
round.

It must now be premised that Mrs. Nugent was utterly
without a trace of what is known as superstition;
for the whole evidential value of what follows, such
as it is, depends upon that fact. She would not,
by preference, sleep in a room immediately after a
death had taken place in it, but solely for the reason
of certain ill-defined physical theories which she
would have summed up under the expression that “it
was but right that the air should be changed.”
Her views on human nature and its component parts
were undoubtedly practical and common-sense.
To put it brutally, Amy’s body was in the churchyard
and Amy’s soul, crowned and robed, in heaven;
so there was no more to account for. She knew
nothing of modern theories, nothing of the revival
of ancient beliefs; she would have regarded with kindly
compassion, and met with practical comments, that unwilling
shrinking from scenes of death occasionally manifested
by certain kind of temperaments.

She turned, then, and looked at the wardrobe, still
full of Amy’s belongings, with her back to the
bed in which Amy had died, without even the faintest
premonitory symptom of the unreasoning terror that
presently seized upon her.

It came about in this way.

She kneeled down, after a careful scrutiny of the
polished surface of the mahogany, pulled out a drawer
filled to brimming over with linen of various kinds
and uses, and began to dive among these with careful
housewifely hands to discover their tale. Simultaneously,
as she remembered afterwards, there came from the
hill leading down from the direction of the station,
the sound of a trotting horse.

Page 127

She paused to listen, her mind full of that faint
gossipy surmise that surges so quickly up in the thoughts
of village dwellers, her hands for an instant motionless
among the linen. It might be the doctor, or Mr.
Paton, or Mr. Grove. Those names flashed upon
her; but an instant later were drowned again in a
kind of fear of which she could give afterwards no
account.

It seemed to her, she said, that there was something
coming towards her that set her a-tremble; and when,
a moment later, the trotting hoofs rang out sharp
and near, she positively relapsed into a kind of sitting
position on the floor, helpless and paralyzed by a
furious up-rush of terror.

For it appeared, so far as Mrs. Nugent could afterwards
make it out, as if a sort of double process went on.
It was not merely that Fear, full-armed, rushed upon
with the approaching wheels, outside and therefore
harmless; but that the room itself in which she crouched,
itself filled with some atmosphere, swift as water
in a rising lock, that held her there motionless,
blind and dumb with horror, unable to move, even to
lift her hands or turn her head. As one approached,
the other rose.

Again sounded the hoofs and wheels, near now and imminent.
Again they hushed as the corner was approached.
Then once more, as they broke out, clear and distinct,
not twenty yards away at the turning into the village,
Mrs. Nugent, no longer able even to keep that rigid
position of fear, sank gently backwards and relapsed
in a huddle on the floor.

II

Mr. Nugent was astonished and even a little peevish
when, on arriving home after dark, he found the parlor
lamp a-smoke and his wife absent.

He inquired for her; the mistress had slipped upstairs
scarcely ten minutes ago. He shouted at the bottom
of the stairs, but there was no response. And
after he had taken his boots off, and his desire for
supper had become poignant, he himself stepped upstairs
to see into the matter....

It was several minutes, even after the conveyal of
an apparently inanimate body downstairs, before his
wife first made clear signs of intelligence; and even
these were little more than grotesque expressions
of fear—­rolling eyes and exclamations.
It was another quarter of an hour before any kind
of connected story could be got out of her. One
conclusion only was evident, that Mrs. Nugent did not
propose to fetch the forgotten candle still burning
on the cloth-covered, brass-nailed table, but that
it must be fetched instantly; the door locked on the
outside, and the key laid before her on that tablecloth.
These were the terms that must be conceded before
any further details were gone into.

Plainly there was but one person to carry out these
instructions, for the little servant-maid was already
all eyes and mouth at the few pregnant sentences that
had fallen from her mistress’s lips. So
Mr. Nugent himself, cloth cap and all, stepped upstairs
once more.

Page 128

He paused at the door and looked in.

All was entirely as usual. In spite of the unpleasant
expectancy roused, in spite of himself and his godliness,
by the words of his wife and her awful head-nodding,
the room gave back to him no echo or lingering scent
of horror. The little bed stood there, white and
innocent in the candlelight, the drawer still gaped,
showing its pathetic contents; the furniture, pictures,
texts, and all the rest remained in their places,
harmless and undefiled as when Amy herself had set
them there.

He looked carefully round before entering; then, stepping
forward, he took the candle, closed the drawer, not
without difficulty, glanced round once more, and went
out, locking the door behind him.

“A pack of nonsense!” he said, as he tossed
the key on to the table before his wife.

The theological discussion waxed late that night,
and by ten o’clock Mrs. Nugent, under the influence
of an excellent supper and a touch of stimulant, had
begun to condemn her own terrors, or rather to cease
to protest when her husband condemned them for her.
A number of solutions had been proposed for the startling
little incident, to none of which did she give an
unqualified denial. It was the stooping that had
done it; there had been a rush of blood to the head
that had emptied the heart and caused the sinking
feeling. It was the watercress eaten in such
abundance on the previous afternoon. It was the
fact that she had passed an unoccupied morning, owing
to the closing of the shop. It was one of those
things, or all of them, or some other like one of them.
Even the little maid was reassured, when she came to
take away the supper things, by the cheerful conversation
of the couple, though she registered a private vow
that for no consideration under heaven would she enter
the bedroom on the right at the top of the stairs.

About half-past ten Mrs. Nugent said that she would
step up to bed; and in that direction she went, accompanied
by her husband, whose program it was presently to
step round to the “Wheatsheaf” for an hour
with the landlord after the bar was shut up.

At the door on the right hand he hesitated, but his
wife passed on sternly; and as she passed into their
own bedroom a piece of news came to his mind.

“That was Mr. Laurie you heard, Mary,”
said he. “Jim told me he saw him go past
just after dark.... Well, I’ll take the
house-key with me.”

Chapter XVI

I

“When is he coming?” asked Mrs. Baxter
with a touch of peevishness, as she sat propped up
in her tall chair before the bedroom fire.

“He will be here about six,” said Maggie.
“Are you sure you have finished?”

The old lady turned away her head from the rice pudding
in a kind of gesture of repulsion. She was in
the fractious period of influenza, and Maggie had
had a hard time with her.

Page 129

Nothing particular had happened for the last ten days.
Mrs. Baxter’s feverish cold had developed, and
she was but now emerging from the nightdress and flannel-jacket
stage to that of the petticoat and dressing-gown.
It was all very ordinary and untragic, and Maggie had
had but little time to consider the events on which
her subconscious attention still dwelt. Mr. Cathcart
had had no particular news to give her. Laurie,
it seemed, was working silently with his coach, talking
little. Yet the old man did not for one instant
withdraw one word that he had said. Only, in
answer to a series of positive inquiries from the
girl two days before, he had told her to wait and see
him for herself, warning her at the same time to show
no signs of perturbation to the boy.

And now the day was come—­Easter Eve, as
it happened—­and she would see him before
night. He had sent no answer to her first letter;
then, finally, a telegram had come that morning announcing
his train.

She was wondering with all her might that afternoon
as to what she would see. In a way she was terrified;
in another way she was contemptuous. The evidence
was so extraordinarily confused. If he were in
danger of insanity, how was it that. Mr. Cathcart
advised her to get him down to a house with only two
women and a few maids? Who was there besides
this old gentleman who ever dreamed that such a danger
was possible? How, if it was so obvious that she
would see the change for herself, was it that others—­Mr.
Morton, for example—­had not seen it too?
More than ever the theory gained force in her mind
that the whole thing was grossly exaggerated by this
old man, and that all that was the matter with Laurie
was a certain nervous strain.

Yet, for all that, as the afternoon closed in, she
felt her nerves tightening. She walked a little
in the garden while the old lady took her nap; she
came in to read to her again from the vellum-bound
little book as the afternoon light began to fade.
Then, after tea, she went under orders to see for
herself whether Laurie’s room was as it should
be.

It struck her with an odd sense of strangeness as
she went in; she scarcely knew why; she told herself
it was because of what she had heard of him lately.
But all was as it should be. There were spring
flowers on the table and mantelshelf, and a pleasant
fire on the hearth. It was even reassuring after
she had been there a minute or two.

Then she went to look at the smoking-room where she
had sat with him and heard the curious noise of the
cracking wood on the night of the thaw, when the boy
had behaved so foolishly. Here, too, was a fire,
a tall porter’s chair drawn on one side with
its back to the door, and a deep leather couch set
opposite. There was a box of Laurie’s cigarettes
set ready on the table—­candles, matches,
flowers, the illustrated papers—­yes, everything.

But she stood looking on it all for a few moments
with an odd emotion. It was familiar, homely,
domestic—­yet it was strange. There
was an air of expectation about it all.... Then
on a sudden the emotions precipitated themselves in
tenderness.... Ah! poor Laurie....

“Sit down, my dearest, for a few minutes.
You’ll hear the wheels from here.... No,
don’t talk or read.”

There, then, the two women sat waiting.

* * * *
*

Outside the twilight was falling, layer on layer,
over the spring garden, in a great stillness.
The chilly wind of the afternoon had dropped, and
there was scarcely a sound to be heard from the living
things about the house that once more were renewing
their strength. Yet over all, to the Catholic’s
mind at least, there lay a shadow of death, from associations
with that strange anniversary that was passing, hour
by hour....

As to what Maggie thought during those minutes of
waiting, she could have given afterwards no coherent
description. Matters were too complicated to
think clearly; she knew so little; there were so many
hypotheses. Yet one emotion dominated the rest—­expectancy
with a tinge of fear. Here she sat, in this peaceful
room, with all the homely paraphernalia of convalescence
about her—­the fire, the bed laid invitingly
open with a couple of books, and a reading-lamp on
the little table at the side, the faint smell of sandalwood;
and before the fire dozed a peaceful old lady full
too of gentle expectation of her son, yet knowing
nothing whatever of the vague perils that were about
him, that had, indeed, whatever they were, already
closed in on him.... And that son was approaching
nearer every instant through the country lanes....

She rose at last and went on tiptoe to the window.
The curtains had not yet been drawn, and she could
see in the fading light the elaborate ironwork of
the tall gate in the fence, and the common road outside
it, gleaming here and there in puddles that caught
the green color from the dying western sky. In
front, on the lawn on this side, burned tiny patches
of white where the crocuses sprouted.

As she stood there, there came a sound of wheels,
and a carriage came in sight. It drew up at the
gate, and the door opened.

II

“He is come,” said the girl softly, as
she saw the tall ulstered figure appear from the carriage.
There was no answer, and as she went on tiptoe to
the fire, she saw that the old lady was asleep.
She went noiselessly out of the room, and stood for
an instant, every pulse racing with horrible excitement,
listening to the footsteps and voices in the hall.
Then she drew a long trembling breath, steadied herself
with a huge effort of the will, and went downstairs.

Page 131

“Mr. Laurie’s gone into the smoking-room,
miss,” said the servant, looking at her oddly.

He was standing by the table as she went in; so much
she could see: but the candles were unlighted,
and no more was visible of him than his outline against
the darkening window.

“Well, Laurie?” she said.

“Well, Maggie,” said his voice in answer.
And their hands met.

Then in an instant she knew that something was wrong.
Yet at the moment she had not an idea as to what it
was that told her that. It was Laurie’s
voice surely!

“You’re all in the dark,” she said.

There was no movement or word in answer. She
passed her hand along the mantelpiece for the matches
she had seen there just before; but her hand shook
so much that some little metal ornament fell with a
crash as she fumbled there, and she drew a long almost
vocal breath of sudden nervous alarm. And still
there was no movement in answer. Only the tall
figure stood watching her it seemed—­a pale
luminous patch showing her his face.

Then she found the matches and struck one; and, keeping
her face downcast, lighted, with fingers that shook
violently, the two candles on the little table by
the fire. She must just be natural and ordinary,
she kept on telling herself. Then with another
fierce effort of will she began to speak, lifting
her eyes to his face as she did so.

“Auntie’s just fallen...” (her voice
died suddenly for an instant, as she saw him looking
at her)—­then she finished—­“just
fallen asleep. Will ... you come up presently
... Laurie?”

Every word was an effort, as she looked steadily into
the eyes that looked so steadily into hers.

It was Laurie—­yes—­but, good
God...!

“You must just kiss her and come away,”
she said, driving out the words with effort after
effort. “She has a bad headache this evening....
Laurie—­a bad headache.”

With a sudden twitch she turned away from those eyes.

“Come, Laurie,” she said. And she
heard his steps following her.

They passed so through the inner hall and upstairs:
and, without turning again, holding herself steady
only by the consciousness that some appalling catastrophe
was imminent if she did not, she opened the door of
the old lady’s room.

“Here he is,” she said. “Now,
Laurie, just kiss her and come away.”

“My dearest,” came the old voice from
the gloom, and two hands were lifted.

Maggie watched, as the tall figure came obediently
forward, in an indescribable terror. It was as
when one watches a man in a tiger’s den....
But the figure bent obediently, and kissed.

Maggie instantly stepped forward.

“Not a word,” she said. “Auntie’s
got a headache. Yes, Auntie, he’s very
well; you’ll see him in the morning. Go
out at once, please, Laurie.”

Without a word he passed out, and, as she closed the
door after him, she heard him stop irresolute on the
landing.

Page 132

“My dearest child,” came the peevish old
voice, “you might have allowed my own son—­”

“No, no, Auntie, you really mustn’t.
I know how bad your head is ... yes, yes; he’s
very well. You’ll see him in the morning.”

And all the while she was conscious of the figure
that must be faced again presently, waiting on the
landing.

“Shall I go and see that everything’s
all right in his room?” she said. “Perhaps
they’ve forgotten—­”

“Yes, my dearest, go and see. And send
Charlotte to me.”

The old voice was growing drowsy again.

Maggie went out swiftly without a word. There
again stood the figure waiting. The landing lamp
had been forgotten. She led the way to his room.

“Come, Laurie,” she said. “I’ll
just see that everything’s all right.”

She found the matches again, lighted the candles,
and set them on his table, still without a look at
that face that turned always as she went.

“We shall have to dine alone,” she said,
striving to make her voice natural, as she reached
the door.

Then once more she raised her eyes to his, and looked
him bravely in the face as he stood by the fire.

“Do just as you like about dressing,”
she said. “I expect you’re tired.”

She could bear it no more. She went out without
another word, passed steadily across the length of
the landing to her own room, locked the door, and
threw herself on her knees.

III

She was roused by a tap on the door—­how
much later she did not know. But the agony was
passed for the present—­the repulsion and
the horror of what she had seen. Perhaps it was
that she did not yet understand the whole truth.
But at least her will was dominant; she was as a man
who has fought with fear alone, and walks, white and
trembling, yet perfectly himself, to the operating
table.

She opened the door; and Susan stood there with a
candle in one hand and a scrap of white in the other.

“For you, miss,” said the maid.

Maggie took it without a word, and read the name and
the penciled message twice.

“Just light the lamp out here,” she said.
“Oh ... and, by the way, send Charlotte to Mrs.
Baxter at once.”

“Yes, miss...”

The maid still paused, eyeing her, as if with an unspoken
question. There was terror too in her eyes.

“Mr. Laurie is not very well,” said Maggie
steadily. “Please take no notice of anything.
And ... and, Susan, I think I shall dine alone this
evening, just a tray up here will do. If Mr. Laurie
says anything, just explain that I am looking after
Mrs. Baxter. And.... Susan—­”

“Yes, miss.”

“Please see that Mrs. Baxter is not told that
I am not dining downstairs.”

“Yes, miss.”

Maggie still stood an instant, hesitating. Then
a thought recurred again.

Page 133

“One moment,” she said.

She stepped across the room to her writing-table,
beckoning the maid to come inside and shut the door;
then she wrote rapidly for a minute or so, enclosed
her note, directed it, and gave it to the girl.

“Just send up someone at once, will you, with
this to Father Mahon—­on a bicycle.”

When the maid was gone, she waited still for an instant
looking across the dark landing, expectant of some
sound or movement. But all was still. A
line of light showed only under the door where the
boy who was called Laurie Baxter stood or sat.
At least he was not moving about. There in the
darkness Maggie tested her power of resisting panic.
Panic was the one fatal thing: so much she understood.
Even if that silent door had opened, she knew she
could stand there still.

She went back, took a wrap from the chair where she
had tossed it down on coming in from the garden that
afternoon, threw it over her head and shoulders, passed
down the stairs and out through the garden once more
in the darkness of the spring evening.

All was quiet in the tiny hamlet as she went along
the road. A blaze of light shone from the tap-room
window where the fathers of families were talking
together, and within Mr. Nugent’s shuttered shop
she could see through the doorway the grocer himself
in his shirt-sleeves, shifting something on the counter.
So great was the tension to which she had strung herself
that she did not even envy the ordinariness of these
people: they appeared to be in some other world,
not attainable by herself. These were busied
with domestic affairs, with beer or cheese or gossip.
Her task was of another kind: so much she knew;
and as to what that task was, she was about to learn.

As she turned the corner, the figure she expected
was waiting there; and she could see in the deep twilight
that he lifted his hat to her. She went straight
up to him.

“Yes,” she said, “I have seen for
myself. You are right so far. Now tell me
what to do.”

It was no time for conventionality. She did not
ask why the solicitor was there. It was enough
that he had come.

“Walk this way then with me,” he said.
“Now tell me what you have seen.”

“I have seen a change I cannot describe at all.
It’s just someone else—­not Laurie
at all. I don’t understand it in the least.
But I just want to know what to do. I have written
to Father Mahon to come.”

He was silent for a step or two.

“I cannot tell you what to do. I must leave
that to yourself. I can only tell you what not
to do.”

“Very well.”

“Miss Deronnais, you are magnificent...!
There, it is said. Now then. You must not
get excited or frightened whatever happens. I
do not believe that you are in any danger—­not
of the ordinary kind, I mean. But if you want
me, I shall be at the inn. I have taken rooms
there for a night or so. And you must not yield
to him interiorly. I wonder if you understand.”

Page 134

“I think I shall understand soon. At present
I understand nothing. I have said I cannot dine
with him.”

“But—­”

“I cannot ... before the servants. One
of them at least suspects something. But I will
sit with him afterwards, if that is right.”

“Very good. You must be with him as much
as you can. Remember, it is not the worst yet.
It is to prevent that worst happening that you must
use all the power you’ve got.”

“Am I to speak to him straight out? And
what shall I tell Father Mahon?”

“You must use your judgment. Your object
is to fight on his side, remember, against this thing
that is obsessing him. Miss Deronnais, I must
give you another warning.”

She bowed. She did not wish to use more words
than were necessary. The strain was frightful.

“It is this: whatever you may see—­little
tricks of speech or movement—­you must not
for one instant yield to the thought that the creature
that is obsessing him is what he thinks it is.
Remember the thing is wholly evil, wholly evil; but
it may, perhaps, do its utmost to hide that, and to
keep up the illusion. It is intelligent, but not
brilliant; it has the intelligence only of some venomous
brute in the slime. Or it may try to frighten
you. You must not be frightened.”

She understood hints here and there of what the old
man said—­enough, at any rate, to act.

“And you must keep up to the utmost pitch your
sympathy with him himself. You must remember
that he is somewhere there, underneath, in chains;
and that, probably, he is struggling too, and needs
you. It is not Possession yet: he is still
partly conscious.... Did he know you?”

“Yes; he just knew me. He was puzzled,
I think.”

“Has he seen anyone else he knows?”

“His mother ... yes. He just knew her too.
He did not speak to her. I would not let him.”

“Miss Deronnais, you have acted admirably....
What is he doing now?”

“I don’t know. I left him in his
room. He was quite quiet.”

“You must go back directly.... Shall we
turn? I don’t think there’s much
more to say just now.”

Then she noticed that he had said nothing about the
priest.

“And what about Father Mahon?” she said.

The old man was silent a moment.

“Well?” she said again.

“Miss Deronnais, I wouldn’t rely on Father
Mahon. I’ve hardly ever met a priest who
takes these things seriously. In theory—­yes,
of course; but not in concrete instances. However,
Father Mahon may be an exception. And the worst
of it is that the priesthood has enormous power, if
they only knew it.”

The tinkle of a bicycle bell sounded down the road
behind them. Maggie wheeled on the instant, and
caught the profile she was expecting.

“Is that you?” she said, as the rider
passed.

The man jumped off, touched his hat, and handed her
a note. She tore it open, and glanced through
it in the light of the bicycle lamp. Then she
crumpled it up and threw it into the ditch with a quick,
impatient movement.

Page 135

“All right,” she said. “Good
night.”

The gardener mounted his bicycle again and moved off.

“Well?” said the old man.

“Father Mahon’s called away suddenly.
It’s from his housekeeper. He’ll
only be back in time for the first mass tomorrow.”

The other nodded, three or four times, as if in assent.

“Why do you do that?” asked the girl suddenly.

“It is what I should have expected to happen.”

“What! Father Mahon?—­Do you
mean it ... it is arranged?”

“I know nothing. It may be coincidence.
Speak no more of it. You have the facts to think
of.”

About them as they walked back in silence lay the
quiet spring night. From the direction of the
hamlet came the banging of a door, then voices wishing
good night, and the sound of footsteps. The steps
passed the end of the lane and died away again.
Over the trees to the right were visible the high
twisted chimney of the old house where the terror
dwelt.

“Two points then to remember,” said the
voice in the darkness—­“Courage and
Love. Can you remember?”

Maggie bowed her head again in answer.

“I will call and ask to see you as soon as the
household is up. If you can’t see me, I
shall understand that things are going well—­or
you can send out a note to me. As for Mrs. Baxter—­”

“I shall not say one word to her until it becomes
absolutely necessary. And if—­”

“If it becomes necessary I will wire for a doctor
from town. I will undertake all the preliminary
arrangements, if you will allow me.”

Ten steps before the corner they stopped.

“God bless you, Miss Deronnais. Remember,
I am at the inn if you need me.”

IV

Mrs. Baxter dined placidly in bed at about half-past
seven; but she was more sleepy than ever when she
had done. She was rash enough to drink a little
claret and water.

“It always goes straight to my head, Charlotte,”
she explained. “Well, set the book—­no,
not that one—­the one bound in white parchment....
Yes, just so, down here; and turn the reading lamp
so that I can read if I want to.... Oh! ask Miss
Maggie to tap at my door very softly when she comes
out from dinner. Has she gone down yet?”

“I think I heard her step just now, ma’am.”

“Very well; then you can just tell Susan to
let her know. How was Mr. Laurie looking, Charlotte?”

“I haven’t seen him, ma’am.”

“Very well. Then that is all, Charlotte.
You can just look in here after Miss Maggie and settle
me for the night.”

Then the door closed, and Mrs. Baxter instantly began
to doze off.

Page 136

She was one of those persons whose moments between
sleeping and waking, especially during a little attack
of feverishness, are occupied in contemplating a number
of little vivid pictures of all kinds that present
themselves to the mental vision; and she saw as usual
a quantity of these, made up of tiny details of the
day that was gone, and of other details markedly unconnected
with it. She saw for example little scenes in
which Maggie and Charlotte and medicine bottles and
Chinese faces and printed pages of a book all moved
together in a sort of convincing incoherence; and she
was just beginning to lose herself in the depths of
sleep, and to forget her firm resolution of reading
another page or so of the book by her side, when a
little sound came, and she opened, as she thought,
her eyes.

Her reading lamp cast a funnel of light across her
bed, and the rest of the room was lit only by the
fire dancing in the chimney. Yet this was bright
enough, she thought at the time, to show her perfectly
distinctly, though with shadows fleeting across it,
her son’s face peering in at the door.
She thought she said something; but she was not sure
afterwards. At any rate, the face did not move;
and it seemed to her that it bore an expression of
such extraordinary malignity that she would hardly
have known it for her son’s. In a sudden
panic she raised herself in bed, staring; and as the
shadows came and went, as she stared, the face was
gone again. Mrs. Baxter drew a quick breath or
two as she looked; but there was nothing. Yet
again she could have sworn that she heard the faint
jar of the closing door.

She reached out and put her hand on the bell-string
that hung down over her bed. Then she hesitated.
It was too ridiculous, she told herself. Besides,
Charlotte would have gone to her room.

But the fear did not go immediately; though she told
herself again and again that it was just one of those
little waking visions that she knew so well.

She lay back on the pillow, thinking.... Why,
they would have reached the fish by now. No;
she would tell Maggie when she came up. How Laurie
would laugh tomorrow! Then, little by little,
she dozed off once more.

The old lady felt the girl’s warm lips on her
forehead. They seemed to linger a little.
Then Mrs. Baxter lost herself once more.

IV

The public bar of the Wheatsheaf Inn was the scene
this evening of a lively discussion. Some thought
the old gentleman, arrived that day from London, to
be a new kind of commercial traveler, with designs
upon the gardens of the gentry; others that he was
a sort of scientific collector; others, again, that
he was a private detective; and since there was no
evidence at all, good or bad, in support of any one
of these suggestions, a very pretty debate became possible.

A silence fell when his step was heard to pass down
the stairs and out into the street, and another half
an hour later when he returned. Then once more
the discussion began.

At ten o’clock the majority of the men moved
out into the moonlight to disperse homewards, as the
landlord began to put away the glasses and glance
at the clock. Overhead the lighted blind showed
where the mysterious stranger still kept vigil; and
over the way, beyond the still leafless trees, towered
up the twisted chimneys of Mrs. Baxter’s house.
No word had been spoken connecting the two, yet one
or two of the men glanced across the way in vague
surmise.

Nearly a couple of hours later the landlord himself
came to the door to give the great Mr. Nugent himself,
with whom he had been sitting in the inner parlor,
a last good-night, and he too noticed that the bedroom
window was still lighted up. He jerked his finger
in the direction of it.

“A late old party,” he said in an undertone.

Mr. Nugent nodded. He was still a little flushed
with whisky and with his previous recountings of what
would have happened if his poor daughter had lived
to marry the young squire, of his (Mr. Nugent’s)
swift social advancement and its outward evidences,
and of the hobnobbing with the gentry that would have
taken place. He looked reflectively across at
the silhouette of the big house, all grey and silver
in the full moon. The landlord followed the direction
of his eyes; and for some reason unknown to them both,
the two stood there silent for a full half-minute.
Yet there was nothing exceptional to be seen.

Page 138

Immediately before them, across the road, rose the
high oak paling that enclosed the lawn on this side,
and the immense limes that towered, untrimmed and
undipped, in delicate soaring filigree against the
peacock sky of night. Behind them showed the chimneys,
above the dusky front of red-brick and the parapet.
The moon was not yet full upon the house, and the
windows glimmered only here and there, in lines and
sudden patches where they caught the reflected light.

Yet the two looked at it in silence. They had
seen such a sight fifty times before, for the landlord
and the other at least twice a week spent such an
evening together, and usually parted at the door.
But they stood here on this evening and looked.

All was as still as a spring night can be. Unseen
and unheard the life of the earth streamed upwards
in twig and blade and leaf, pushing on to the miracle
of the prophet Jonas, to be revealed in wealth of color
and scent and sound a fortnight later. The wind
had fallen; the last doors were shut, and the two
figures standing here were as still as all else.
To neither of them occurred even the thinnest shadow
of a suspicion as to the cause that held them here—­two
plain men—­in silence, staring at an old
house—­not a thought of any hidden life
beyond that of matter, that life by which most men
reckon existence. For them this was but one more
night such as they had known for half a century.
There was a moon. It was fine. That was Mrs.
Baxter’s house. This was the village street:—­that
was the sum of the situation....

Mr. Nugent moved off presently with a brisk air, bidding
his friend good night, and the landlord, after another
look, went in. There came the sound of bolts
and bars, the light in the window of the parlor beside
the bar suddenly went out, footsteps creaked upstairs;
a door shut, and all was silence.

Half an hour later a shadow moved across the blind
upstairs: an arm appeared to elongate itself;
then, up went the blind, the window followed it, and
a bearded face looked out into the moonlight.
Behind was the table littered with papers, for Mr.
Cathcart, laborious even in the midst of anxiety,
had brought down with him for the Sunday a quantity
of business that could not easily wait; and had sat
there patiently docketing, correcting, and writing
ever since his interview in the lane nearly five hours
before.

Even now his face seemed serene enough; it jerked
softly this way and that, up the street and down again;
then once more settled down to stare across the road
at the grey and silver pile beyond the trees.
Yet even he saw nothing there beyond what the landlord
had seen. It stood there, uncrossed by lights
or footsteps or sounds, keeping its secret well, even
from him who knew what it contained.

Page 139

Yet to the watcher the place was as sinister as a
prison. Behind the solemn walls and the superficial
flash of the windows, beneath the silence and the
serenity, lay a life more terrible than death, engaged
now in some drama of which he could not guess the issue.
A conflict was proceeding there, more silent than
the silence itself. Two souls fought for one
against a foe of unknown strength and unguessed possibilities.
The servants slept apart, and the old mistress apart,
yet in one of those rooms (and he did not know which)
a battle was locked of which the issue was more stupendous
than that of any struggle with disease. Yet he
could do nothing to help, except what he already did,
with his fingers twisting and gripping a string of
beads beneath the window-sill. Such a battle
as this must be fought by picked champions; and since
the priesthood in this instance could not help, a
girl’s courage and love must take its place.

From the village above the hill came the stroke of
a single bell; a bird in the garden-walk beyond the
paling chirped softly to his mate; then once more
silence came down upon the moonlit street, the striped
shadows, the tall house and trees, and the bearded
face watching at the window.

Chapter XVII

I

The little inner hall looked very quiet and familiar
as Maggie Deronnais stood on the landing, passing
through her last struggle with herself before the
shock of battle. The stairs went straight down,
with the old carpet, up and down which she had gone
a thousand times, with every faint patch and line
where it was a little worn at the edges, visible in
the lamplight from overhead; and she stared at these,
standing there silent in her white dress, bare-armed
and bare-necked, with her hair in great coils on her
head, as upright as a lance. Beneath lay the
little hall, with the tiger-skin, the red-papered
walls, and a few miscellaneous things—­an
old cloak of hers she used on rainy days in the garden,
a straw hat of Laurie’s, and a cap or two, hanging
on the pegs opposite. In front was the door to
the outer hall, to the left, that of the smoking-room.
The house was perfectly quiet. Dinner had been
cleared away already through the hatch into the kitchen
passage, and the servants’ quarters were on the
other side of the house. No sound of any kind
came from the smoking-room; not even the faint whiff
of tobacco-smoke that had a way of stealing out when
Laurie was smoking really seriously within.

She did not know why, she had stopped there, half-way
down the stairs.

She had dined from a tray in her own room, as she
had said; and had been there alone ever since, for
the most part at her prie-Dieu, in dead silence,
conscious of nothing connected, listening to the occasional
tread of a maid in the hall beneath, passing to and
from the dining-room. There she had tried to
face the ordeal that was coming—­the ordeal,
at the nature of which even now she only half guessed,
and she had realized nothing, formed no plan, considered
no eventuality. Things were so wholly out of
her experience that she had no process whereby to
deal with them. Just two words came over and
over again before her consciousness—­Courage
and Love.

Page 140

She looked again at the door.

Laurie was there, she said. Then she questioned
herself. Was it Laurie...?

“He is there, underneath,” she whispered
to herself softly; “he is waiting for me to
help him.” She remembered that she must
make that act of faith. Yet was it Laurie who
had looked in at his mother’s door...?
Well, the door was locked now. But that secretive
visit seemed to her terrible.

What, then, did she believe?

She had put that question to herself fifty times,
and found no answer. The old man’s solution
was clear enough now: he believed no less than
that out of that infinitely mysterious void that lies
beyond the veils of sense there had come a Personality,
strong, malignant, degraded, and seeking to degrade,
seizing upon this lad’s soul, in the disguise
of a dead girl, and desiring to possess it. How
fantastic that sounded! Did she believe it?
She did not know. Then there was the solution
of a nervous strain, rising to a climax of insanity.
This was the answer of the average doctor. Did
she believe that? Was that enough to account
for the look in the boy’s eyes? She did
not know.

She understood perfectly that the fact of herself
living under conditions of matter made the second
solution the more natural; yet that did not content
her. For her religion informed her emphatically
that discarnate Personalities existed which desired
the ruin of human souls, and, indeed, forbade the
practices of spiritualism for this very reason.
Yet there was hardly a Catholic she knew who regarded
the possibility in these days as more than a theoretical
one. So she hesitated, holding her judgment in
suspense. One thing only she saw clearly, and
that was that she must act as if she believed the former
solution: she must treat the boy as one obsessed,
whether indeed he were so or not. There was no
other manner in which she could concentrate her force
upon the heart of the struggle. If there were
no evil Personality in the affair, it was necessary
to assume one.

And still she waited.

There came back to her an old childish memory.

Once, as a child of ten, she had had to undergo a
small operation. One of the nuns had taken her
to the doctor’s house. When she had understood
that she must come into the next room and have it done,
she had stopped dead. The nun had encouraged
her.

After a minute’s waiting, while they looked
at her, she had gone forward, sat down in the chair
and behaved quite perfectly. Yes; she understood
that now. It was necessary first to collect forces,
to concentrate energies, to subdue the imagination:
after that almost anything could be borne.

So she stood here now, without even the thought of
flight, not arguing, not reassuring herself, not analyzing
anything; but just gathering strength, screwing the
will tight, facing things.

Page 141

And there was yet another psychological fact that
astonished her, though she was only conscious of it
in a parenthetical kind of way, and that was the strength
of her feeling for Laurie himself. It seemed
to her curious, when she considered it, how the horror
of that which lay over the boy seemed, like death
itself, to throw out as on a clear background the
best of himself. His figure appeared to her memory
as wholly good and sweet; the shadows on his character
seemed absorbed in the darkness that lay over him;
and towards this figure she experienced a sense of
protective love and energy that astonished her.
She desired with all her power to seize and rescue
him.

Then she drew a long steady breath, thrust out her
strong white hand to see if the fingers trembled;
went down the stairs, and, without knocking, opened
the smoking-room door and went straight in, closing
it behind her. There was a screen to be passed
round.

She passed round it.

And he sat there on the couch looking at her.

II

For the first instant she remained there standing
motionless; it was like a declaration of war.
In one or two of her fragmentary rehearsals upstairs
she had supposed she would say something conventional
to begin with. But the reality struck conventionality
clean out of the realm of the possible. Her silent
pause there was as significant as the crouch of a
hound; and she perceived that it was recognized to
be so by the other that was there. There was
in him that quick, silent alertness she had expected:
half defiant, half timid, as of a fierce beast that
expects a blow.

Then she came a step forward and sideways to a chair,
sat down in it with a swift, almost menacing motion,
and remained there still looking.

This is what she saw:

There was the familiar background, the dark paneled
wall, the engraving, and the shelf of books convenient
to the hand; the fire was on her right, and the couch
opposite. Upon the couch sat the figure of the
boy she knew so well.

He was in the same suit in which he had traveled;
he had not even changed his shoes; they were splashed
a little with London mud. These things she noticed
in the minutes that followed, though she kept her
eyes upon his face.

The face itself was beyond her power of analysis.
Line for line it was Laurie’s features, mouth,
eyes and hair; yet its signification was not Laurie’s.
One that was akin looked at her from out of those windows
of the soul—­scrutinized her cautiously,
questioningly, and suspiciously. It was the face
of an enemy who waits. And she sat and looked
at it.

A full minute must have passed before she spoke.
The face had dropped its eyes after the first long
look, as if in a kind of relaxation, and remained
motionless, staring at the fire in a sort of dejection.
Yet beneath, she perceived plainly, there was the
same alert hostility; and when she spoke the eyes
rose again with a quick furtive attentiveness.
The semi-intelligent beast was soothed, but not yet
reassured.

Page 142

“Laurie?” she said.

The lips moved a little in answer; then again the
face glanced down sideways at the fire; the hands
dangled almost helplessly between the knees.

There was an appearance of weakness about the attitude
that astonished and encouraged her; it appeared as
if matters were not yet consummated. Yet she
had a sense of nausea at the sight....

“Laurie?” she said again suddenly.

Again the lips moved as if speaking rapidly, and the
eyes looked up at her quick and suspicious.

“Well?” said the mouth; and still the
hands dangled.

“Laurie,” she said steadily, bending all
her will at the words, “you’re very unwell.
Do you understand that?”

Again the noiseless gabbling of the lips, and again
a little commonplace sentence, “I’m all
right.”

His voice was unnatural—­a little hoarse,
and quite toneless. It was as a voice from behind
a mask.

“No,” said Maggie carefully, “you’re
not all right. Listen, Laurie. I tell you
you’re all wrong; and I’ve come to help
you as well as I can. Will you do your best?
I’m speaking to you, Laurie ... to you.”

Every time he answered, the lips flickered first as
in rapid conversation—­as of a man seen
talking through a window; but this time he stammered
a little over his vowels.

“I—­I—­I’m all right.”

Maggie leaned forward, her hands clasped tightly,
and her eyes fixed steadily on that baffling face.

“Laurie; it’s you I’m speaking to—­you....
Can you hear me? Do you understand?”

Again the eyes rose quick and suspicious; and her
hands knit yet more closely together as she fought
down the rising nausea. She drew a long breath
first; then she delivered a little speech which she
had half rehearsed upstairs. As she spoke he
looked at her again.

“Laurie,” she said, “I want you
to listen to me very carefully, and to trust me.
I know what is the matter with you; and I think you
know too. You can’t fight—­fight
him by yourself.... Just hold on as tightly as
you can to me—­with your mind, I mean.
Do you understand?”

For a moment she thought that he perceived something
of what she meant: he looked at her so earnestly
with those odd questioning eyes. Then he jerked
ever so slightly, as if some string had been suddenly
pulled, and glanced down again at the fire....

“I ... I ... I’m all right,”
he said.

It was horrible to see that motionlessness of body.
He sat there as he had probably sat since entering
the room. His eyes moved, but scarcely his head;
and his hands hung down helplessly.

“Laurie ... attend ...” she began again.
Then she broke off.

“Have you prayed, Laurie...? Do you understand
what has happened to you? You aren’t really
ill—­at least, not exactly, but—­”

Again those eyes lifted, looked, and dropped again.

It was piteous. For the instant the sense of
nausea vanished, swallowed up in emotion. Why
... why, he was there all the while—­Laurie
... dear Laurie....

Page 143

With one motion, swift and impetuous, she had thrown
herself forward on to her knees, and clasped at the
hanging hands.

Again slowly the eyes moved round. He had started
ever so little at her rush, and the seizing of his
hands; and now she felt those hands moving weakly
in her own, as of a sleeping child who tries to detach
himself from his mother’s arms.

“I ... I ... I’m all—­”

She grasped his hands more fiercely, staring straight
up into those strange piteous eyes that revealed so
little, except formless commotion and uneasiness.

“Say the Our Father with me. ‘Our
Father—­’”

Then his hands tore back, with a movement as fierce
as her own, and the eyes blazed with an unreal light.
She still clung to his wrists, looking up, struck
with a paralysis of fear at the change, and the furious
hostility that flamed up in the face. The lips
writhed back, half snarling, half smiling....

“Let go! let go!” he hissed at her.
“What are you—­”

“The Our Father, Laurie ... the Our—­”

He wrenched himself backwards, striking her under
the chin with his knee. The couch slid backwards
a foot against the wall, and he was on his feet.
She remained terror-stricken, shocked, looking up at
the dully flushed face that glared down on her.

“Laurie! Laurie...! Don’t you
understand? Say one prayer—­”

“How dare you?” he whispered; “how
dare you—­”

She stood up suddenly—­wrenching her will
back to self-command. Her breath still came quick
and panting; and she waited until once more she breathed
naturally. And all the while he stood looking
down at her with eyes of extraordinary malevolence.

“Well, will you sit quietly and listen?”
she said. “Will you do that?”

Still he stared at her, with lips closed, breathing
rapidly through his nostrils. With a sudden movement
she turned and went to her chair, sat down and waited.

He still watched her; then, with his eyes on her,
with movements as of a man in the act of self-defense,
wheeled out the sofa to its place, and sat down.
She waited till the tension of his figure seemed to
relax again, till the quick glances at her from beneath
drooping eyelids ceased, and once more he settled
down with dangling hands to look at the fire.
Then she began again, quietly and decisively.

“Your mother isn’t well,” she said.
“No ... just listen quietly. What is going
to happen tomorrow? I’m speaking to you,
Laurie to you. Do you understand?”

Page 144

“Yes, I’m Maggie. You trust me, don’t
you, Laurie? You can believe what I say?
Well, I want you to fight too. You and I together.
Will you let me do what I can?”

Again the eyes rose, with that odd questioning look.
Maggie thought she perceived something else there
too. She gathered her forces quietly in silence
an instant or two, feeling her heart quicken like
the pulse of a moving engine. Then she sprang
to her feet.

“Listen, then—­in the name of Jesus
of Nazareth—­”

He recoiled violently with a movement so fierce that
the words died on her lips. For one moment she
thought he was going to spring. And again he
was on his feet, snarling. There was silence for
an interminable instant; then a stream of words, scorching
and ferocious, snarled at her like the furious growling
of a dog—­a string of blasphemies and filth.

Just so much she understood. Yet she held her
ground, unable to speak, conscious of the torrent
of language that swirled against her from that suffused
face opposite, yet not understanding a tenth part of
what she heard.

... “In the name of...”

On the instant the words ceased; but so overpowering
was the venom and malice of the silence that followed
that again she was silent, perceiving that the utmost
she could do was to hold her ground. So the two
stood. If the words were horrible to hear, the
silence was more horrible a thousand times; it was
as when a man faces the suddenly opened door of a
furnace and sees the white cavern within.

He was the first to speak.

“You had better take care,” he said.

III

She scarcely knew how it was that she found herself
again in her chair, with the figure seated opposite.

It seemed that the direct assault was useless.
And indeed she was no longer capable of making it.
The nausea had returned, and with it a sensation of
weakness. Her knees still were lax and useless;
and her hand, as she turned it on the chair-arm, shook
violently. Yet she had a curious sense of irresponsibility:
there was no longer any terror—­nothing
but an overpowering weakness of reaction.

She sat back in silence for some minutes, looking
now at the fire too, now at the figure opposite, noticing,
however, that the helplessness seemed gone. His
hands dangled no longer; he sat upright, his hands
clasped, yet with a curious look of stiffness and unnaturalness.

Once more she began deliberately to attempt to gather
her forces; but the will, it appeared, had lost its
nervous grasp of the faculties. It had no longer
that quick grip and command with which she had begun.
Passivity rather than activity seemed her strength....

Page 145

Then suddenly and, as it appeared, inevitably, without
movement or sound, she began internally to pray, closing
her eyes, careless, and indeed unfearing. It
seemed her one hope. And behind the steady movement
of her will—­sufficient at least to elicit
acts of petition—­her intellect observed
a thousand images and thoughts. She perceived
the silence of the house and of the breathless spring
night outside; she considered Mr. Cathcart in the
inn across the road, Mrs. Baxter upstairs: she
contemplated the future as it would be on the morrow—­Easter
Day, was it not?—­the past, and scarcely
at all the present. She relinquished all plans,
all intentions and hopes: she leaned simply upon
the supernatural, like a tired child, and looked at
pictures.

* * * *
*

In remembering it all afterwards, she recalled to
herself the fact that this process of prayer seemed
strangely tranquil; that there had been in her a consciousness
of rest and recuperation as marked as that which a
traveler feels who turns into a lighted house from
a stormy night. The presence of that other in
the room was not even an interruption; the nervous
force that the other had generated just now seemed
harmless and ineffective. For a time, at least,
that was so. But there came a moment when it
appeared as if her almost mechanical and rhythmical
action of internal effort began to grip something.
It was as when an engine after running free clenches
itself again upon some wheel or cog.

The moment she was aware of this, she opened her eyes;
and saw that the other was looking straight at her
intently and questioningly. And in that moment
she perceived for the first time that her conflict
lay, not externally, as she had thought, but in some
interior region of which she was wholly ignorant.
It was not by word or action, but by something else
which she only half understood that she was to struggle....

She closed her eyes again with quite a new kind of
determination. It was not self-command that she
needed, but a steady interior concentration of forces.

She began again that resolute wordless play of the
will—­dismissing with a series of efforts
the intellectual images of thought—­that
play of the will which, it seemed, had affected the
boy opposite in a new way. She had no idea of
what the crisis would be, or how it would come.
She only saw that she had struck upon a new path that
led somewhere. She must follow it.

Some little sound roused her; she opened her eyes
and looked up.

He had shifted his position, and for a moment her
heart leapt with hope. For he sat now leaning
forward, his elbows on his knees, and his head in
his hands, and in the shaded lamplight it seemed that
he was shaking.

She too moved, and the rustle of her dress seemed
to reach him. He glanced up, and before he dropped
his head again she caught a clear sight of his face.
He was laughing, silently and overpoweringly, without
a sound....

Page 146

For a moment the nausea seized her so fiercely that
she gasped, catching at her throat; and she stared
at that bowed head and shaking shoulders with a horror
that she had not felt before. The laughter was
worse than all: and it was a little while before
she perceived its unreality. It was like a laughing
machine. And the silence of it gave it a peculiar
touch.

She wrestled with herself, driving down the despair
that was on her. Courage and love.

Again she leaned back without speaking, closing her
eyes to shut out the terror, and began desperately
and resolutely to bend her will again to the task.

Again a little sound disturbed her.

Once more he had shifted his position, and was looking
straight at her with a curious air of detached interest.
His face looked almost natural, though it was still
flushed with that forced laughter; but the mirth itself
was gone. Then he spoke abruptly and sharply,
in the tone of a man who speaks to a tiresome child;
and a little conversation followed, in which she found
herself taking a part, as in an unnatural dream.

“You had better take care,” he said.

“I am not afraid.”

“Well—­I have warned you. It
is at your own risk. What are you doing?”

“I am praying.”

“I thought so.... Well, you had better
take care.”

She nodded at him; closed her eyes once more with
new confidence, and set to work.

After that a series of little scenes followed, of
which, a few days later, she could only give a disconnected
account.

She had heard the locking of the front door a long
while ago; and she knew that the household was gone
to bed. It was then that she realized how long
the struggle would be. But the next incident was
marked in her memory by her hearing the tall clock
in the silent hall outside beat one. It was immediately
after this that he spoke once more.

“I have stood it long enough,” he said,
in that same abrupt manner.

She opened her eyes.

“You are still praying?” he said.

She nodded.

He got up without a word and came over to her, leaning
forward with his hands on his knees to peer into her
face. Again, to her astonishment, she was not
terrified. She just waited, looking narrowly
at the strange person who looked through Laurie’s
eyes and spoke through his mouth. It was all
as unreal as a fantastic dream. It seemed like
some abominable game or drama that had to be gone through.

“And you mean to go on praying?”

“Yes.”

“Do you think it’s the slightest use?”

“Yes.”

He smiled unnaturally, as if the muscles of his mouth
were not perfectly obedient.

“Well, I have warned you,” he said.

Then he turned, went back to his couch, and this time
lay down on it flat, turning over on his side, away
from her, as if to sleep. He settled himself
there like a dog. She looked at him a moment;
then closed her eyes and began again.

Page 147

* * * *
*

Five minutes later she understood.

The first symptom of which she was aware was a powerlessness
to formulate her prayers. Up to that point she
had leaned, as has been said, on an enormous Power
external to herself, yet approached by an interior
way. Now it required an effort of the will to
hold to that Power at all. In terms of space,
let it be said that she had rested, like a child in
the dark, upon Something that sustained her: now
she was aware that it no longer sustained her; but
that it needed a strong continuous effort to apprehend
it at all. There was still the dark about her;
but it was of a different quality—­it cannot
be expressed otherwise—­it was as the darkness
of an unknown gulf compared to the darkness of a familiar
room. It was of such a nature that space and
form seemed meaningless....

The next symptom was a sense of terror, comparable
only to that which she had succeeded in crushing down
as she stood on the stairs four or five hours before.
That, however, had been external to her; she had entered
it. Now it had entered her, and lay, heavy as
pitch, upon the very springs of her interior life.
It was terror of something to come. That which
it heralded was not yet come: but it was approaching.

The third symptom was the approach itself—­swift
and silent, like the running of a bear; so swift that
it was upon her through the dark before she could
stir or act. It came upon her, in a flash at the
last; and she understood the whole secret.

It is possible only to describe it as, afterwards,
she described it herself. The powerlessness and
the terror were no more than the far-off effect of
its approach; the Thing itself was the center.

Of that realm of being from which it came she had
no previous conception: she had known evil only
in its effects—­in sins of herself and others—­known
it as a man passing through a hospital ward sees flushed
or pale faces, or bandaged wounds. Now she caught
some glimpse of its essence, in the atmosphere of
this bear-like thing that was upon her. As aches
and pains are to Death, so were sins to this Personality—­symptoms,
premonitions, causes, but not Itself. And she
was aware that the Thing had come from a spiritual
distance so unthinkable and immeasurable, that the
very word distance meant little.

Of the Presence itself and its mode she could use
nothing better than metaphors. But those to whom
she spoke were given to understand that it was not
this or that faculty of her being that, so to speak,
pushed against it; but that her entire being was saturated
so entirely, that it was but just possible to distinguish
her inmost self from it. The understanding no
longer moved; the emotions no longer rebelled; memory
simply ceased. Yet through the worst there remained
one minute, infinitesimally small spark of identity
that maintained “I am I; and I am not that.”
There was no analysis or consideration; scarcely even

Page 148

a sense of disgust. In fact for a while there
was a period when to that tiny spot of identity it
appeared that it would be an incalculable relief to
cease from striving, and to let self itself be merged
in that Personality so amazingly strong and compelling,
that had precipitated itself upon the rest....
Relief? Certainly. For though emotion as
most men know it was crushed out—­that emotion
stirred by human love or hatred—­there remained
an instinct which strove, which, by one long continuous
tension, maintained itself in being.

For the malignity of the thing was overwhelming.
It was not mere pressure; it had a character of its
own for which the girl afterwards had no words.
She could only say that, so far from being negation,
or emptiness, or non-being, it had an air, hot as
flame, black as pitch, and hard as iron.

That then was the situation for a time which she could
only afterwards reckon by guesswork; there was no
development or movement—­no measurable incidents;
there was but the state that remained poised; below
all those comparatively superficial faculties with
which men in general carry on their affairs—­that
state in which two Personalities faced one another,
welded together in a grip that lay on the very brink
of fusion....

Chapter XVIII

I

The cocks were crowing from the yards behind the village
when Maggie opened her eyes, clear shrill music, answered
from the hill as by their echoes, and the yews outside
were alive with the dawn-chirping of the sparrows.

She lay there quite quietly, watching under her tired
eyelids, through the still unshuttered windows, the
splendid glow, seen behind the twisted stems in front
and the slender fairy forest of birches on the further
side of the garden. Immediately outside the window
lay the path, deep in yew-needles, the ground-ivy
beyond, and the wet lawn glistening in the strange
mystical light of morning.

She had no need to remember or consider. She
knew every step and process of the night. That
was Laurie who lay opposite in a deep sleep, his head
on his arm, breathing deeply and regularly; and this
was the little smoking-room where she had seen the
cigarettes laid ready against his coming, last night.

There was still a log just alight on the hearth, she
noticed. She got out of her chair, softly and
stiffly, for she felt intolerably languid and tired.
Besides, she must not disturb the boy. So she
went down on her knees, and, with infinite craft,
picked out a coal or two from the fender and dropped
them neatly into the core of red-heat that still smoldered.
But a fragment of wood detached itself and fell with
a sharp sound; and she knew, even without turning
her head, that the boy had awakened. There was
a faint inarticulate murmur, a rustle and a long sigh.

Then she turned round.

Laurie was lying on his back, his arms clasped behind
his head, looking at her with a quiet meditative air.
He appeared no more astonished or perplexed than herself.
He was a little white-looking and tired in the light
of dawn, but his eyes were bright and sure.

Page 149

She rose from her knees again, still silent, and stood
looking down on him, and he looked back at her.
There was no need of speech. It was one of those
moments in which one does not even say that there are
no words to use; one just regards the thing, like
a stretch of open country. It is contemplation,
not comment, that is needed.

Her eyes wandered away presently, with the same tranquility,
to the brightening garden outside; and her slowly
awakening mind, expanding within, sent up a little
scrap of quotation to be answered.

“While it was yet early ... there came to the
sepulcher.” How did it run? “Mary...”
Then she spoke.

“It is Easter Day, Laurie.”

The boy nodded gently; and she saw his eyes slowly
closing once more; he was not yet half awake.
So she went past him on tiptoe to the window, turned
the handle, and opened the white tall framework-like
door. A gush of air, sweet as wine, laden with
the smell of dew and spring flowers and wet lawns,
stole in to meet her; and a blackbird, in the shrubbery
across the garden, broke into song, interrupted himself,
chattered melodiously, and scurried out to vanish in
a long curve behind the yews. The very world
itself of beast and bird was still but half awake,
and from the hamlet outside the fence, beyond the
trees, rose as yet no skein of smoke and no sound of
feet upon the cobbles.

For the time no future presented itself to her.
The minutes that passed were enough. She regarded
indeed the fact of the old man asleep in the inn,
of the old lady upstairs, but she rehearsed nothing
of what should be said to them by and by. She
did not even think of the hour, or whether she should
go to bed presently for a while. She traced no
sequence of thought; she scarcely gave a glance at
what was past; it was the present only that absorbed
her; and even of the present not more than a fraction
lay before her attention—­the wet lawn,
the brightening east, the cool air—­those
with the joy that had come with the morning were enough.

* * * *
*

Again came the long sigh behind her; and a moment
afterwards there was a step upon the floor, and Laurie
himself stood by her. She glanced at him sideways,
wondering for an instant whether his mood was as hers;
and his grave, tired, boyish face was answer enough.
He met her eyes, and then again let his own stray
out to the garden.

He was the first to speak.

“Maggie,” he said, “I think we had
best never speak of this again to one another.”
She nodded, but he went on—­

“I understand very little. I wish to understand
no more. I shall ask no questions, and nothing
need be said to anybody. You agree?”

“I agree perfectly,” she said.

“And not a word to my mother, of course.”

“Of course not.”

* * * *
*

The two were silent again.

Page 150

And now reality—­or rather, the faculties
of memory and consideration by which reality is apprehended—­were
once more coming back to the girl and beginning to
stir in her mind. She began, gently now, and
without perturbation, to recall what had passed, the
long crescendo of the previous months, the gathering
mutter of the spiritual storm that had burst last
night—­even the roar and flare of the storm
itself, and the mad instinctive fight for the conscious
life and identity of herself through which she had
struggled. And it seemed to her as if the storm,
like others in the material plane, had washed things
clean again, and discharged an oppression of which
she had been but half conscious. Neither was
it herself alone who had emerged into this “clear
shining after rain”; but the boy that stood by
her seemed to her to share in her joy. They stood
here together now in a spiritual garden, of which
this lovely morning was no more than a clumsy translation
into another tongue. There stirred an air about
them which was as wine to the soul, a coolness and
clearness that was beyond thought, in a radiance that
shone through all that was bathed within it, as sunlight
that filtered through water. She perceived then
that the experience had been an initiation for them
both, that here they stood, one by the other, each
transparent to the other, or, at least, he transparent
to her; and she wondered, not whether he would see
it as she did, for of that she was confident, but
when. For this space of silence she perceived
him through and through, and understood that perception
was everything. She saw the flaws in him as plainly
as in herself, the cracks in the crystal; yet these
did not matter, for the crystal was crystal....

So she waited, confident, until he should understand
it too.

“But that is only one fraction of what is in
my mind—­” He broke off.

Then for the first time since she had opened her eyes
just now her heart began to beat. That which
had lain hidden for so long—­that which
she had crushed down under stone and seal and bidden
lie still—­yet that which had held her resolute,
all unknown to herself, through the night that was
gone—­once more asserted itself and waited
for liberation.

“Yet how dare I—­” began Laurie.

Again she glanced at him, terrified lest that which
was in her heart should declare itself too plainly
by eyes and lips; and she saw how he still looked
across the garden, yet seeing nothing but his own thought
written there against the glory of sky and leaf and
grass. His face caught the splendor from the
east, and she saw in it the lines that would tell
always of the anguish through which he was come; and
again the terror in her heart leapt to the other side,
in spite of her confidence, and bade her fear lest
through some mistake, some conventional shame, he
should say no more.

Then he turned his troubled eyes and looked her in
the face, and as he looked the trouble cleared.

Page 151

“Why—­Maggie!” he said.

Epilogue

“The worst of it all is,” said Maggie,
four months later, to a very patient female friend
who adored her, and was her confidante just
then—­“the worst of it is that I’m
not in the least sure of what it is that I believe
even now.”

“Tell me, dear,” said the girl.

* * * *
*

The two were sitting out in a delightfully contrived
retreat cut out at the lower end of the double hedge.
Above them and on two sides rose masses of August
greenery, hazel and beech, as close as the roof and
walls of a summer-house: the long path ran in
green gloom up to the old brick steps beneath the
yews: and before the two girls rested the pleasant
apparatus of tea—­silver, china and damask,
all the more delightful from its barbaric contrast
with its surroundings.

Maggie looked marvelously well, considering the nervous
strain that had come upon her about Easter-time.
She had collapsed altogether, it seemed, in Easter
week itself, and had been for a long rest—­one
at her own dear French convent until a week ago, being
entirely forbidden by the nuns to speak of her experiences
at all, so soon as they had heard the rough outline.
Mrs. Baxter had spent the time in rather melancholy
travel on the Continent, and was coming back this evening.

“It seems to me now exactly like a very bad
dream,” said Maggie pensively, beginning to
measure in the tea with a small silver scoop.
“Oh! Mabel; may I tell you exactly what
is in my mind: and then we won’t talk of
it any more at all?”

“Oh! do,” said the girl, with a little
comfortable movement.

When the tea had been poured out and the plates set
ready to hand, Maggie began.

* * * *
*

“It seems perfectly dreadful of me to have any
doubts at all, after all this; but ... but you don’t
know how queer it seems. There’s a kind
of thick hedge—­” she waved a hand
illustratively to the hazels beside her—­“a
kind of thick hedge between me and Easter—­I
suppose it’s the illness: the nuns tell
me so. Well, it’s like that. I can
see myself, and Laurie, and Mr. Cathcart, and all
the rest of them, like figures moving beyond; and
they all seem to me to be behaving rather madly, as
if they saw something that I can’t see....
Oh! it’s hopeless....

“Well, the first theory I have is that these
little figures, myself included, really see something
that I can’t now: that there really was
something or somebody, which makes them dance about
like that. (Yes: that’s not grammar; but
you understand, don’t you?) Well, I’ll
come back to that presently.

Page 152

“And my next theory is this ... is this”—­Maggie
sipped her tea meditatively—­“my next
theory is that the whole thing was simple imagination,
or, rather, imagination acting upon a few little facts
and coincidences, and perhaps a little fraud too.
Do you know the way, if you’re jealous or irritable,
the way in which everything seems to fit in?
Every single word the person you’re suspicious
of utters all fits in and corroborates your idea.
It isn’t mere imagination: you have real
facts, of a kind; but what’s the matter is that
you choose to take the facts in one way and not another.
You select and arrange until the thing is perfectly
convincing. And yet, you know, in nine cases
out of ten it’s simply a lie...! Oh!
I can’t explain all the things, certainly.
I can’t explain, for instance, the pencil affair—­when
it stood up on end before Laurie’s eyes; that
is, if it did really stand up at all. He says
himself that the whole thing seems rather dim now,
as if he had seen it in a very vivid dream. (Have one
of these sugar things?)

“Then there are the appearances Laurie saw;
and the extraordinary effect they finally had upon
him. Oh! yes; at the time, on the night of Easter
Eve, I mean, I was absolutely certain that the thing
was real, that he was actually obsessed, that the
thing—­the Personality, I mean—­came
at me instead, and that somehow I won. Mr. Cathcart
tells me I’m right—­Well; I’ll
come to that presently. But if it didn’t
happen, I certainly can’t explain what did; but
there are a good many things one can’t explain;
and yet one doesn’t instantly rush to the conclusion
that they’re done by the devil. People say
that we know very little indeed about the inner working
of our own selves. There’s instinct, for
instance. We know nothing about that except that
it is so. ‘Inherited experience’
is only rather a clumsy phrase—­a piece of
paper gummed up to cover a crack in the wall.

“And that brings me to my third theory.”

Maggie poured out for herself a second cup of tea.

“My third theory I’m rather vague about,
altogether. And yet I see quite well that it
may be the true one. (Please don’t interrupt
till I’ve quite done.)

“We’ve got in us certain powers that we
don’t understand at all. For instance,
there’s thought-projection. There’s
not a shadow of doubt that that is so. I can
sit here and send you a message of what I’m
thinking about—­oh! vaguely, of course.
It’s another form of what we mean by Sympathy
and Intuition. Well, you know, some people think
that haunted houses can be explained by this.
When the murder is going on, the murderer and the
murdered person are probably fearfully excited—­anger,
fear, and so on. That means that their whole being
is stirred up right to the bottom, and that their
hidden powers are frightfully active. Well, the
idea is that these hidden powers are almost like acids,
or gas—­Hudson tells us all about that—­and
that they can actually stamp themselves upon the room
to such a degree that when a sympathetic person comes
in, years afterwards, perhaps, he sees the whole thing
just as it happened. It acts upon his mind first,
of course, and then outwards through the senses—­just
the reverse order to that in which we generally see
things.

Page 153

“Well—­that’s only an illustration.
Now my idea is this: How do we know whether all
the things that happened, from the pencil and the
rappings and the automatic writing, right up to the
appearances Laurie saw, were not just the result of
these inner powers.... Look here. When one
person projects his thought to another it arrives generally
like a very faint phantom of the thing he’s thinking
about. If I’m thinking of the ace of hearts,
you see a white rectangle with a red spot in the middle.
See? Well, multiply all that a hundred times,
and one can just see how it might be possible that
the thought of ... of Mr. Vincent and Laurie together
might produce a kind of unreal phantom that could
even be touched, perhaps.... Oh! I don’t
know.”

Maggie paused. The girl at her side gave an encouraging
murmur.

“Well—­that’s about all,”
said Maggie slowly.

“But you haven’t—­”

“Why, how stupid! Yes: the first theory....
Now that just shows how unreal it is to me now.
I’d forgotten it.

“Well, the first theory, my dear brethren, divides
itself into two heads—­first the theory
of the spiritualists, secondly the theory of Mr. Cathcart.
(He’s a dear, Mabel, even though I don’t
believe one word he says.)

“Well, the spiritualist theory seems to me simple
R.-O.-T.—­rot. Mr. Vincent, Mrs. Stapleton,
and the rest, really think that the souls of people
actually come back and do these things; that it was,
really and truly, poor dear Amy Nugent who led Laurie
such a dance. I’m quite, quite certain
that that’s not true whatever else is....
Yes, I’ll come to the coincidences presently.
But how can it possibly be that Amy should come back
and do these things, and hurt Laurie so horribly?
Why, she couldn’t if she tried. My dear,
to be quite frank, she was a very common little thing:
and, besides, she wouldn’t have hurt a hair
of his head.

“Now for Mr. Cathcart.”

There was a long pause. A small cat stepped out
suddenly from the hazel tangle behind and eyed the
two girls. Then, quite noiselessly, as it caught
Maggie’s eye, it opened its mouth in a pathetic
curve intended to represent, an appeal.

“You darling!” cried Maggie suddenly;
seized a saucer, filled it with milk, and set it on
the ground. The small cat stepped daintily down,
and set to work.

“Yes?” said the other girl tentatively.

“Oh! Mr. Cathcart.... Well, I must
say that his theory fits in with what Father Mahon
says. But, you know, theology doesn’t say
that this or that particular thing is the devil, or
has actually happened in any given instance—­only
that, if it really does happen, it is the devil.
Well, this is Mr. Cathcart’s idea. It’s
a long story: you mustn’t mind.

Page 154

“First, he believes in the devil in quite an
extraordinary way.... Oh! yes, I know we do too;
but it’s so very real indeed with him. He
believes that the air is simply thick with them, all
doing their very utmost to get hold of human beings.
Yes, I suppose we do believe that too; but I expect
that since there are such a quantity of things—­like
bad dreams—­that we used to think were the
devil, and now only turn out to be indigestion, that
we’re rather too skeptical. Well, Mr. Cathcart
believes both in indigestion, so to speak, and
the devil. He believes that those evil spirits
are at us all the time, trying to get in at any crack
they can find—­that in one person they produce
lunacy—­I must say it seems to me rather
odd the way in which lunatics so very often become
horribly blasphemous and things like that—­and
in another just shattered nerves, and so on.
They take advantage, he says, of any weak spot anywhere.

“Now one of the easiest ways of all is through
spiritualism. Spiritualism is wrong—­we
know that well enough; it is wrong because it’s
trying to live a life and find out things that are
beyond us at present. It’s ‘wrong’
on the very lowest estimate, because it’s outraging
our human nature. Yes, Mabel, that’s his
phrase. Good intentions, therefore, don’t
protect us in the least. To go to seances
with good intentions is like ... like ... holding a
smoking-concert in a powder-magazine on behalf of an
orphan asylum. It’s not the least protection—­I’m
not being profane, my dear—­it’s not
the least protection to open the concert with prayer.
We’ve got no business there at all. So
we’re blown up just the same.

“The danger...? Oh! the danger’s
this, Mr. Cathcart says. At seances, if
they’re genuine, and with automatic handwriting
and all the rest, you deliberately approach those
powers in a friendly way, and by the sort of passivity
which you’ve got to get yourself into, you open
yourself as widely as possible to their entrance.
Very often they can’t get in; and then you’re
only bothered. But sometimes they can, and then
you’re done. It’s particularly hard
to get them out again.

“Now, of course, no one in his senses—­especially
decent people—­would dream of doing all
this if he knew what it all meant. So these creatures,
whatever they may be, always pretend to be somebody
else. They’re very sharp: they can
pick up all kinds of odds and ends, little tricks,
and little facts; and so, with these, they impersonate
someone whom the inquirer’s very fond of; and
they say all sorts of pious, happy little things at
first in order to lead them on. So they go on
for a long time saying that religion’s quite
true. (By the way, it’s rather too odd the way
in which the Catholic Church seems the one thing they
don’t like! You can be almost anything else,
if you’re a spiritualist; but you can’t
be a Catholic.) Generally, though, they tell you to
say your prayers and sing hymns. (Father Mahon the
other day, when I was arguing with him about having
some hymns in church, said that heretics always went
in for hymns!) And so you go on. Then they begin
to hint that religion’s not worth much; and then
they attack morals. Mr. Cathcart wouldn’t
tell me about that; but he said it got just as bad
as it could be, if you didn’t take care.”

Page 155

Maggie paused again, looking rather serious.
Her voice had risen a little, and a new color had
come to her face as she talked. She stooped to
pick up the saucer.

“Dearest, had you better—­”

“Oh! yes: I’ve just about done,”
said Maggie briskly. “There’s hardly
any more. Well, there’s the idea. They
want to get possession of human beings and move them,
so they start like that.

“Well; that’s what Mr. Cathcart says happened
to Laurie. One of those Beasts came and impersonated
poor Amy. He picked up certain things about her—­her
appearance, her trick of stammering, and of playing
with her fingers, and about her grave and so on:
and then, finally, made his appearance in her shape.”

“I don’t understand about that,”
murmured the girl.

“Oh! my dear, I can’t bother about that
now. There’s a lot about astral substance,
and so on. Besides, this is only what Mr. Cathcart
says. As I told you, I’m not at all sure
that I believe one word of it. But that’s
his idea.”

Maggie stopped again suddenly, and leaned back, staring
out at the luminous green roof of hazels above her.
The small cat could be discerned half-way up the leafy
tunnel swaying its body in preparation for a pounce,
while overhead sounded an agitated twittering.
Mabel seized a pebble, and threw it with such success
that the swaying stopped, and a reproachful cat-face
looked round at her.

“There!” said Mabel comfortably; and then,
“Well, what do you really think?”

Maggie smiled reflectively.

“That’s exactly what I don’t know
myself in the very least. As I said, all this
seems to me more like a dream—­and a very
bad one. I think it’s the ... the nastiest
thing,” she added vindictively, “that I’ve
ever come across; I don’t want to hear one word
more about it as long as I live.”

“But—­”

“Oh, my dear, why can’t we be all just
sensible and normal? I love doing just ordinary
little things—­the garden, and the chickens,
and the cat and dog and complaining to the butcher.
I cannot imagine what anybody wants with anything
else. Yes; I suppose I do, in a sort of way,
believe Mr. Cathcart. It seems to me, granted
the spiritual world at all—­which, naturally,
I do grant—­far the most intelligent explanation.
It seems to me, intellectually, far the most broad-minded
explanation; because it really does take in all the
facts—­if they are facts—­and
accounts for them reasonably. Whereas the subjective—­self
business—­oh, it’s frightfully clever
and ingenious—­but it does assume such a
very great deal. It seems to me rather like the
people who say that electricity accounts for everything—­electricity!
And as for the imagination theory—­well,
that’s what appeals to me now, emotionally—­because
I happen to be in the chickens and butcher mood; but
it doesn’t in the least convince me. Yes;
I suppose Mr. Cathcart’s theory is the one I
ought to believe, and, in a way, the one I do believe;
but that doesn’t in the least prevent me from
feeling it extraordinarily unreal and impossible.
Anyhow, it doesn’t matter much.”

Page 156

Again she leaned back comfortably, smiling to herself,
and there was a long silence.

It was a divinely beautiful August evening. From
where they sat little could be seen except the long
vista of the path, arched with hazels, whence the
cat had now disappeared, ending in three old brick
steps, wide and flat, lichened and mossed, set about
with flower-pots and leading up to the yew walk.
But the whole air was full of summer sound and life
and scent, heavy and redolent, streaming in from the
old box-lined kitchen-garden on their right beyond
the hedge and from the orchard on the left. It
was the kind of atmosphere suggesting Nature in her
most sensible mood, full-blooded, normal, perfectly
fulfilling her own vocation; utterly unmystical, except
by very subtle interpretation; unsuggestive, since
she was already saying all that could be said, and
following out every principle by which she lived to
the furthest confine of its contents. It presented
the same kind of rounded-off completion and satisfactoriness
as that suggested by an entirely sensuous and comfortable
person. There were no corners in it, no vistas
hinting at anything except at some perfectly normal
lawn or set garden, no mystery, no implication of
any other theory or glimpse of theory except that
which itself proclaimed.

Something of its air seemed now to breathe in Maggie’s
expression of contentment, as she smiled softly and
happily, clasping her arms behind her head. She
looked perfectly charming, thought Mabel; and she
laid a hand delicately on her friend’s knee,
as if to share in the satisfaction—­to verify
it by participation, so to speak.

“It doesn’t seem to have done you much
harm,” she said.

“No, thank you; I’m extremely well and
very content. I’ve looked through the door
once, without in the least wishing to; and I don’t
in the least want to look again. It’s not
a nice view.”

“But about—­er—­religion,”
said the younger girl rather awkwardly.

“Oh! religion’s all right,” said
Maggie. “The Church gives me just as much
of all that as is good for me; and, for the rest, just
tells me to be quiet and not bother—­above
all, not to peep or pry. Listeners hear no good
of themselves: and I suppose that’s true
of the other senses too. At any rate, I’m
going to do my best to mind nothing except my own
business.”

“Isn’t that rather unenterprising?”

“Certainly it is; that’s why I like it....
Oh! Mabel, I do want to be so absolutely ordinary
all the rest of my life. It’s so extremely
rare and original, you know. Didn’t somebody
say that there was nothing so uncommon as common sense?
Well, that’s what I’m going to be.
A genius! Don’t you understand?—­the
kind that is an infinite capacity for taking pains,
not the other sort.”

“What is the other sort?”

“Why, an infinite capacity for doing without
them. Like Wagner, you know. Well, I wish
to be the Bach sort—­the kind of thing that
anyone ought to be able to do—­only they
can’t.”

Page 157

Mabel smiled doubtfully.

“Lady Laura was saying—­” she
began presently.

Maggie’s face turned suddenly severe.

“I don’t wish to hear one word.”

“But she’s given it up,” cried the
girl. “She’s given it up.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” said Maggie
judicially. “And I hope now that she’ll
spend the rest of her days in sackcloth—­with
a scourge,” she added. “Oh, did I
tell you about Mrs. Nugent?”

“About the evening Laurie came home? Yes.”

“Well, that’s all right. The poor
old dear got all sorts of things on her mind, when
it leaked out. But I talked to her, and we went
up together and put flowers on the grave, and I said
I’d have a mass said for Amy, though I’m
sure she doesn’t require one. The poor darling!
But ... but ... (don’t think me brutal, please)
how providential her death was! Just think!”

“Mrs. Baxter’s coming home by the 6.10,
isn’t she?”

Maggie nodded.

“Yes; but you know you mustn’t say a word
to her about all this. In fact she won’t
have it. She’s perfectly convinced that
Laurie overworked himself—­Laurie, overworked!—­and
that that was just all that was the matter with him.
Auntie’s what’s called a sensible woman,
you know, and I must say it’s rather restful.
It’s what I want to be; but it’s a far-off
aspiration, I’m afraid, though I’m nearer
it than I was.”

“You mean she doesn’t think anything odd
happened at all?”

“Just so. Nothing at all odd. All
very natural. Oh, by the way, Laurie swears he
never put his nose inside her room that night, but
I’m absolutely certain he did, and didn’t
know it.”

“Where is Mr. Lawrence?”

“Auntie made him go abroad.”

“And when does he come back?”

There was a perceptible pause.

“Mr. Lawrence comes back on Saturday evening,”
said Maggie deliberately.